Difficulty in preventing crops from plant viruses urges to discover novel efficient antiviral chemicals, which is sped up by precise screening methods. Fluorescence-based methods have recently been applied as innovative and rapid tools for visually monitoring the replication of viruses and screening of antivirals, whereas the quantification of fluorescence signals mainly depends on manually calculating the fluorescent spots, which is time-consuming and imprecise. In the present work, the fluorescence spots were automatically identified, and the fluorescence area was directly quantified by a program developed in our group, which avoided subjective errors from the operators. We further employed this digital and visual screening assay to identify antivirals using the tobacco mosaic virus-green fluorescence protein (TMV-GFP) construct, in which the expression of GFP intuitively reflected the efficacy of antivirals. The accuracy of this assay was validated by quantifying the activities of the commercial antiviral inhibitors ribavirin and ningnanmycin and then was applied to evaluate the subtle activity differences of a series of newly synthesized carbazole and β-carboline alkaloid derivatives. Among them, compounds 5 (76%) and 11 (63%) exhibited anti-TMV activities comparable to that of ningnanmycin (65%) at 50 μM, and they delayed the multiplication of TMV in the early stage of infection without phytotoxicity. Taken together, these findings demonstrated that the digital and visual TMV-GFP screening method was competent to test the antiviral activities of compounds with subtle modifications and facilitated the discovery of novel antivirals.
Keywords: carbazole alkaloids; digital and visual antiviral screening; green fluorescence protein; tobacco mosaic virus; β-carboline alkaloids.