Highly Sensitive Lineage Discrimination of SARS-CoV-2 Variants through Allele-Specific Probe PCR
Ratcliff J., Al-Beidh F., Bibi S., Bonsall D., Costa Clemens SA., Estcourt L., Evans A., Fish M., Folegatti PM., Gordon AC., Jay C., Jennings A., Laing E., Lambe T., MacIntyre-Cockett G., Menon D., Mouncey PR., Nguyen D., Pollard AJ., Ramasamy MN., Roberts DJ., Rowan KM., Rynne J., Shankar-Hari M., Williams S., Harvala H., Golubchik T., Simmonds P.
Tools to detect SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern and track the ongoing evolution of the virus are necessary to support public health efforts and the design and evaluation of novel COVID-19 therapeutics and vaccines. Although next-generation sequencing (NGS) has been adopted as the gold standard method for discriminating SARS-CoV-2 lineages, alternative methods may be required when processing samples with low viral loads or low RNA quality.