FRANKFURT/COPENHAGEN: Germany’s Qiagen, a leading genetic testing supplier, on Thursday warned against re-engineering standard tests to monitor for new variants of the coronavirus, saying the more onerous decoding of the entire viral genome was the best method.
Scientists believe more contagious variants have fuelled a surge in global coronavirus cases that have exceeded 90 million, and nations are racing to procure vaccines and tighten lockdown measures.
Standard COVID-19 diagnostic kits, called polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, scan for a few characteristic genes in the viral genome, while whole genome sequencing, the established procedure to identify new variants, means reading out and analysing the entire genetic code.
Public health systems are eager to track the spread of the new virus types, such as the one that is rampant in Britain, and receive alarms on new ones, exemplified by Germany’s bid this week to ramp up genome sequencing.
In principle, it is possible to…