A public website for the automated assessment and validation of SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic PCR assays

Abstract

Polymerase chain reaction-based assays are the current gold standard for detecting and diagnosing SARS-CoV-2. However, as SARS-CoV-2 mutates, we need to constantly assess whether existing PCR-based assays will continue to detect all known viral strains. To enable the continuous monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 assays, we have developed a web-based assay validation algorithm that checks existing PCR-based assays against the ever-expanding genome databases for SARS-CoV-2 using both thermodynamic and edit-distance metrics. The assay-screening results are displayed as a heatmap, showing the number of mismatches between each detection and each SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence. Using a mismatch threshold to define detection failure, assay performance is summarized with the true-positive rate (recall) to simplify assay comparisons.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Aug 10, 2020
Source ID
10.1093/bioinformatics/btaa710

Entities

People

  • Adán Myers y Gutiérrez
  • Bin Hu
  • Chien-Chi Lo
  • Elais Player Jackson
  • Jason Gans
  • Karen W Davenport
  • Mark Flynn
  • Migun Shakya
  • Patrick S Chain
  • Po‐E Li
  • Yan Xu

Organizations

  • Defense Threat Reduction Agency
  • Los Alamos National Laboratory
  • National Science Foundation
  • United States Department of Energy

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Biology

Readers

  • Molecular Genetics
  • Oncology and Biomarker-Based Cancer Detection.
  • Organic Chemistry