Scoop: Lab for coronavirus test kits may have been contaminated

[applegrove]

Scoop: Lab for coronavirus test kits may have been contaminated

Jonathan Swan, Caitlin Owens

https://www.axios.com/cdc-lab-coronavirus-contaminated-6dc9726d-dea3-423f-b5ad-eb7b1e44c2e2.html

"SNIP.....

A top federal scientist sounded the alarm about what he feared was contamination in an Atlanta lab where the government made test kits for the coronavirus, according to sources familiar with the situation in Atlanta.

Driving the news: The Trump administration has ordered an independent investigation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lab, and manufacturing of the virus test kits has been moved, the sources said.

Why it matters: At the time the administration is under scrutiny for its early preparations for the virus, the potential problems at the lab became a top internal priority for some officials. But the Trump administration did not talk publicly about the Food and Drug Administration’s specific concerns about the Atlanta lab.


* Senior officials are still not saying exactly what the FDA regulator found at the Atlanta lab.


.....SNIP"

[stillcool]

1. and Trump is going there tomorrow

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100213035244

[Maine-i-acs]

2. Hopefully RNA/DNA contamination, not live virus

From replicating the RNA/DNA sequence after artificially synthesizing it.

The sequence is known and when it is replicating, it grows logarithmically. Unlike the live virus, the genetic material itself is not inherently infectious or harmful.

But a little bit escaping out of a test tube can contaminate a whole lab - the RNA/DNA tests are very sensitive so every test run can be false positive due to these escaping snippets of genetic material.

[applegrove]

4. Thanks. Hopefully it is fixed.

[Maine-i-acs]

5. Bleach and UV light can clean it out.

Cleaning every nook and cranny is the challenge, sine this can ride around on dust particles.

[applegrove]

6. Wow. You know a lot.

[intrepidity]

7. This explains why their negative-controls in the test kit were posituve

The kits could technically still have been used, even for preliminary screening, if just that one vial was contaminated.

But, I guess it's logical to assume *all* the other vials could also be contaminated.

It's not rocket science for labs to have their own primers made, it's just a sequence, fercrissakes!

[applegrove]

8. Neither of you are speaking my language. I loved science until grade

13. This discussion i started is beyond me.

[intrepidity]

9. A negative control is some unrelated nucleic acid (DNA/RNA)

that was prepared in the same environment as the rest of the components of the test kit.

So that when the test is run, and your test sample shows a positive result for coronavirus, you can be confident that it's real and not an artifact from a faulty test kit.

A "primer" is the important part of the PCR process. This is a short (15 or so nucleotides, A C T G) piece of DNA that works to kickstart the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) -- the sequence is uniquely specific to the coronavirus, so that during the procedure, it can find and bind to the coronavirus, if present. If the coronavirus is not present, the "primer" can't and doesn't bind to it's target and no reaction can take place, proving the absence of the virus--a negative result.

That may not be helpful after all, lol.

[applegrove]

10. I sort of get it. Thanks.