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Slack / Private Message Drop, p.576 [SLACK_000790] · slack_pm:msg:06016

Date: 2021-03-08 15:04
Type: chat message · slack
recipient: Robert F. Garry, Edward C. Holmes, Andrew Rambaut
speaker: Kristian G. Andersen

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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.

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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.
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 .
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.
2021-03-08 15:02 Robert F. Garry open

In general the RNA (even fragmented non-infectious) hangs a lot longer than any infectious virus.
2021-03-08 15:04 Kristian G. Andersen

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.
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.
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?
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.
2021-03-08 15:07 Robert F. Garry open

Screening species with serology though I think is the way to go - that is why Lin-Fa's ACE2BOB makes sense - find the species that have antibodies then trap the hell out of them until you get lucky and hit one at peak viremia/RNA.

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