New Technique Can Cheaply and Efficiently Detect All Known Viruses in a Blood Sample

Monday, September 28th, 2015

Think of VirCapSeq-VERT as a massive exercise in fishing for viruses:

To make the hooks, the team identified and synthesized distinctive stretches of DNA from the genomes of every known group of virus that affects humans and other vertebrates. They ended up with two million of these hooks, each of which was baited to snag a different virus. If you dangle them in a blood sample, yank them out, and then sequence everything that’s attached to them, you end up with the full genome of every virus present.

The team tested the system using tissue samples spiked with genes from many infamous viruses, including those responsible for Ebola, dengue, flu, and MERS. They also tried analyzing a nasal swab from a patient and a stool sample from a bat. VirCapSeq-VERT successfully identified all the viruses in these samples, even when they were present at miniscule amounts.

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New Technique Can Cheaply and Efficiently Detect All Known Viruses in a Blood Sample

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