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Slack / Private Message Drop, p.576 [SLACK_000790] · slack_pm:msg:06015

Page text: p.576 · original PDF

Date
2021-03-08 15:02
Type
chat message · slack
recipient
Kristian G. Andersen, Edward C. Holmes, Andrew Rambaut
speaker
Robert F. Garry

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In general the RNA (even fragmented non-infectious) hangs a lot longer than any infectious virus.

In context

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  1. 2021-03-08 14:54 Andrew Rambaut open
    And if you just out sampling to look for diversity you are probably going to store the samples to preserve RNA rather than hope to culture anything.
  2. 2021-03-08 14:55 Robert F. Garry open
    Yes - you might try to get lucky and if your cold chain was good freeze some sample away, but RNA Is the way to goin most field situations.
  3. 2021-03-08 14:58 Robert F. Garry open
    But - most likely - screening by culturing is not going to be a sensitive as screening the RNA, if you know what you are doing with the RNA .
  4. 2021-03-08 14:58 Edward C. Holmes open
    We and colleagues do this all the time. The plan is always to get into a cold chain as quick as possible for sequencing. We do have a portable -80C we use in some cases, but it's usually a case of storage in RNAlater.
  5. 2021-03-08 15:02 Robert F. Garry
    In general the RNA (even fragmented non-infectious) hangs a lot longer than any infectious virus.
  6. 2021-03-08 15:04 Kristian G. Andersen open
    Yeah, culturing viruses from bats or any other animal = bloody hard. I wouldn't be surprised that if you had 50 bats all infected with SC2, you'd only be able to grow it out of one of those.
  7. 2021-03-08 15:04 Robert F. Garry open
    Explains some of the problems in the diagnostic space - Start mixing in detection with antigen assays [which correlates not so well with infectious virus or RNA] and it gets complicated fast.
  8. 2021-03-08 15:06 Andrew Rambaut open
    But that means these ideas about WIV sampling viruses from the wild and one of the accidentally escapes might bewrong?
  9. 2021-03-08 15:07 Kristian G. Andersen open
    I think most of those people underestimate how incredibly hard it is to grow stuff from such samples, yes.

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