Project description:The ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and subsequent demand for viral testing worldwide has led to major issues in scaling the efforts of diagnostic labs and even in securing basic supplies for collection and processing of samples. This has in turn led to worldwide efforts by the scientific community to establish improved protocols that are cheaper, more scalable, and not as resource intensive. One such effort resulted in an assay called “Swab-Seq”, which was so named because it was originally developed to work with dry nasal swab samples, but is actually flexible in terms of the sample type it can accommodate for testing. The assay adapts the existing gold standard (RNA extracted from a nasopharyngeal (NP) swab that is subjected to quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction, “qRT-PCR”) to a next-generation sequencing readout. By pairing this modification with extraction-free sampling techniques it is possible to achieve high scalability at low cost per sample, and a reasonable turnaround time for reporting results. We evaluated the effectiveness of this assay both on samples collected from asymptomatic individuals using the traditional NP swab and using alternative extraction-free sampling techniques, including saliva and a saline mouth gargle protocol, and found the assay to be highly sensitive (comparable to the standard qRT-PCR assay), flexible (adaptable to saliva and gargle samples stored at room temperature up to a week), and scalable (easily accommodating hundreds of samples at a time). Continued development in the future will lead to more effective testing regimes that reduce the burden of transmissible respiratory infections on the global community.
Project description:Biopsy specimens were collected from rectal cancer before starting preoperative radiotherapy.The expression profiles were determined using Affymetrix Human Genome U95 version 2 arrays.Comparison between the sample groups allow to identify a set of discriminating genes that can be used for characterization of responders and nonresponders to preoperative radiotherapy in rectal cancer. Keywords: repeat
Project description:Samples were prospectively collected during colonoscopic examination from 46 rectal cancer patients before starting preoperative chemoradiotherapy. The expression profiles were determined using Affymetrix Human Genome U133 Plus 2.0 arrays. Comparison between the sample groups allow to identify a set of discriminating genes that can be used for prediction of the response to radiotherapy in rectal cancer.