L2 murine fibroblasts were seeded in a 6-well plate at a density of 1x10 6 cells/well and cultured overnight in 2 ml per well of Dulbecco's Modification of Eagle's Medium (DMEM) with 4.5g/L glucose, 2 mM L-glutamine and 10 mM sodium pyruvate (Corning, NY), supplemented with 10% γ-irradiated fetal bovine serum (FBS, Cytiva, Marlborough, MA) and 10 ug/mL ciprofloxacin hydrochloride antibiotic (Bio-World, Dublin, OH) at 37 °C with 5% CO 2 . Twenty-four hours after seeding the cells were washed with 1X Dulbecco's phosphate-buffered saline (DPBS) (Corning) and infected with lectin-virus samples. For the sample prep, the lectins were mixed with the prototype of the betacoronavirus group, mouse hepatitis virus (MHV-A59) ( ) at various multiplicity of infection (MOI) and were incubated for 30 mins at 37°C. Following this, the cells were incubated for 1 hour at 37°C for virus adsorption before the addition of highly pure agarose overlay (Invitrogen, USA) and re-incubated for two days at 37°C, 5% CO 2 . To count the plaques, cells were overlaid with neutral red (Sigma-Aldrich, St. Louis, MO) mixed with agarose-2% FBS DMEM and incubated for 6 hours at 37°C, 5% CO 2 . Next, the plaques were counted, and the viral titer was calculated as plaque forming units (PFU)/mL.