Photo Credit WHO
# 7784
Dr. Ian Mackay takes an early look at the recently deposited (at GenBank) MERS coronavirus sequences in advance of an upcoming Lancet article, and the good news is these sequences precisely match the existing primers used in the current PCR assays.
Ian has two posts on this topic (which is well above my pay grade, but luckily, not above his . . . ) and so I’m relieved to be able to pass these links onto my readers.
MERS-CoV genomes on GenBank...[UPDATE]
Click to enlarge. A scale schematic of the first
MERS-CoV genome, EMC/2012.45 subgenomic (the smallest is 361 nucleotides [nt]) to full length genome (only 13; >30,000nt) sequences of the MERS-CoV have been released onto GenBank ahead of a Lancet Infectious Diseases paper arriving in days. The GenBank accession numbers range from KF600612 - KF600656 and repsenst human cases form 2012 & 2013.
17 new MERS-CoV sequences bind perfectly to frontline screening PCR assay for MERS...
Only 17 of the 45 sequences seem to include the region covered by the upE laboratory assay I just posted about in the WHO laboratory testing update but of those, the forward and reverse oligonucleotide primers and the probe all bind without any mismatch.
While that may sound like an obvious statement considering that these viruses were probably detected using that assay it isn't.
