FRONTIERS PHOTONICS
VACCINE DEVELOPMENT
Accessible RNA sequencing helps tackle Covid-19
Genome sequencing becoming more affordable has helped give scientists and health authorities the information needed to tackle the virus
LIFE SCIENCES/MEDICAL
B
eing able to identify and understand the coronavirus rapidly was crucial for the development of therapies and
vaccines. Affordable photonics-enabled gene sequencing has played a major role, from determining the source and genetic make-up of the new virus at the start of the outbreak, to tracking how it spreads and evolves today.
An organism’s genetic material – its
genome – is essentially its instruction manual, which contains all the information needed to survive and reproduce. Human genomes are made of double-stranded DNA and are written in its special code of four nucleotide base ‘letters’. Human genomes
are made up of more than three billion base letters, while a virus genome – made up of either DNA or RNA – is much smaller. SARS-CoV-2 has a single short RNA strand just 30,000 letters long. In sequencing, these letters can be ‘read’ one by one. Soon after a mystery respiratory illness caused an increase in hospital admissions in Wuhan, China, next-generation sequencing (NGS) was used to identify the illness as SARS-CoV-2. As the virus spread, sequencing its genome allowed public health officials to monitor how it was spreading across populations. NGS allowed scientists to determine the viral genome mutational rate (~1-2
bases/month) which subsequently allowed experts to investigate whether the identified mutations were likely to impact PCR-based diagnostic test results, the efficacy of re-purposed anti-viral treatments, or the development of vaccines. Many NGS techniques rely on light to
determine the sequence of nucleotide base letters. Illumina’s sequencing by synthesis (SBS) technology is one such technique that has been widely adopted for virus research. The process simultaneously identifies DNA bases while incorporating them into a nucleic acid chain. Each base emits a unique fluorescent signal as it is added to the growing strand, which is used
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