Clinical performance characteristics of the Swift Normalase Amplicon Panel for sensitive recovery of SARS-CoV-2 genomes.
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ABSTRACT: Amplicon-based sequencing methods have been central in characterizing the diversity, transmission, and evolution of SARS-CoV-2, but need to be rigorously assessed for clinical utility. Here, we validated the Swift Biosciences' SARS-CoV-2 Swift Normalase Amplicon Panels using remnant clinical specimens. High quality genomes meeting our established library and sequence quality criteria were recovered from positive specimens with 95% limit of detection of 40.08 SARS-CoV-2 copies/PCR reaction. Breadth of genome recovery ≥was evaluated across a range of Ct values (11.3 - 36.7, median 21.6). Out of 428 positive samples, 413 (96.5%) generated genomes with < 10% Ns, with a mean genome coverage of 13,545X ± SD 8,382X. No genomes were recovered from PCR-negative specimens (n = 30), or from specimens positive for non-SARS-CoV-2 respiratory viruses (n = 20). Compared to whole-genome shotgun metagenomic sequencing (n = 14) or Sanger sequencing for the spike gene (n = 11), pairwise identity between consensus sequences was 100% in all cases, with highly concordant allele frequencies (R2 = 0.99) between Swift and shotgun libraries. When samples from different clades were mixed at varying ratios, expected variants were detected even in 1:99 mixtures. When deployed as a clinical test, 268 tests were performed in the first 23 weeks with a median turnaround time of 11 days, ordered primarily for outbreak investigations and infection control.
SUBMITTER: Shrestha L
PROVIDER: S-EPMC9290336 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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