Slack / Private Message Drop — page 576

produce their Covs at high levels even if you caught then just right . The intermediate hosts/reservoirs, might grow virus to higher levels (like say civets for SC1), but probably varies a lot from animal to animal like humans . Sick snotty nose pangolins might have higher loads for their viruses, too. Same apparently true of camels for MERS-CoV. All these considerations are why no-one's cultured ebola virus from a bat yet. [2021-03-08 14:54:07] [Andrew Rambaut] 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. [2021-03-08 14:55:51] [Robert Garry] Yes - you might try to get lucky and if your cold chain was good freeze some sample away, but RNA Is the way to go in most field situations. [2021-03-08 14:58:49] [Robert Garry] 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 14:58:51] [Eddie Holmes] 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 15:02:25] [Robert Garry] In general the RNA (even fragmented non-infectious) hangs a lot longer than any infectious virus. [2021-03-08 15:04:14] [Kristian 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 15:04:38] [Robert Garry] 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 15:06:43] [Andrew Rambaut] [thread - ID: 2021-03-08 15:06:43] But that means these ideas about WIV sampling viruses from the wild and one of the accidentally escapes might be wrong? [2021-03-08 15:07:34] [Kristian Andersen] I think most of those people underestimate how incredibly hard it is to grow stuff from such samples, yes. [2021-03-08 15:07:52] [Robert Garry] 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. [2021-03-08 15:07:57] [Kristian Andersen]