An updated version of our manuscript on antibody cross-reactivity between seasonal coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2 is now online: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.14.095414v2

Plenty of new data in this version, including a proper sensitivity and specificity analysis of our flow assay in distinguishing SARS-CoV-2-infected from uninfected individuals on the basis of IgG+IgM+IgA+:

However, we show that pre-pandemic serum with cross-reactive antibodies has some neutralizing activity against authentic SARS-CoV-2 virus, though it does not neutralize as strongly as COVID serum as expected:

Most interestingly, we find that up to 60% of healthy adolescents show cross-reactivity (compared to ~6% of adults) - this drops off steeply at age 17:

We tried to identify whether certain strains of seasonal coronavirus were better at inducing cross-reactive antibodies, but IgG antibodies from all strains correlated equally with the presence of SARS-CoV-2 cross-reactivity:

Finally, we used a peptide arrays to identify epitopes in SARS-CoV-2 S2 that were targeted by these cross-reactive antibodies, which may be potential targets for a universal coronavirus vaccine:

A massive thanks as always to all of our collaborators at @TheCrick @uclh for making this work possible!