Brad Langhorst
Product Development Group Leader - New England Biolabs
The precise sequence of the viruses infecting our community members can inform our response. I’ll share some results and details about the workflow we use to prepare, sequence, and reason about the viruses identified in our CLIA screening.
High mutation rates observed in RNA viruses like SARS-CoV-2 have been shown to disrupt amplification based detection and sequencing methods. To produce a more variant-resistant sequencing method, we identified all variants observed more than 1000 times in consensus sequences present in GISAID. We produced thousands of multiplex PCR designs and identified those that were least affected by known variants. During product development and scale-up, we periodically evaluated designs comparing with variants that arose during product development. NEB VarSkip designs exhibited fewer primer site variant overlaps than ARTICv4 or Midnight primer schemes.
High mutation rates observed in RNA viruses like SARS-CoV-2 have been shown to disrupt amplification based detection and sequencing methods. To produce a more variant-resistant sequencing method, we identified all variants observed more than 1000 times in consensus sequences present in GISAID. We produced thousands of multiplex PCR designs and identified those that were least affected by known variants. During product development and scale-up, we periodically evaluated designs comparing with variants that arose during product development. NEB VarSkip designs exhibited fewer primer site variant overlaps than ARTICv4 or Midnight primer schemes.
We have made the pRESTO suite of tools available in Galaxy for use with the NEBNext AbSeq immune sequencing kit
Meta-data aware, high-throuput sequence result aggregation