Chinese Medical Journal
Fan, Hang; Zhang, Xiang-Li-Lan; Zhang, Ya-Wei; Huang, Yong; Teng, Yue; Guo, Yan; Mi, Zhi-Qiang; Yang, Rui-Fu; Song, Ya-Jun; Cui, Yu-Jun.
Abstract
In December 2019, a coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak caused by the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) happened in Wuhan, China. Since then, it has spread to many countries and poses a world-wide public health threat. Real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) was recommended as an effective pathogen detection method and has played an important role in prevention and control of the current outbreak. Many research institutions have released their primer sets for RT-qPCR. However, the 2019- nCoV genome has evolved during the outbreak. If the variant sites were located in the primer regions, the efficiency of RT-qPCR would be reduced, thus possibly causing false negative results, and leading to unpredictable impact on the diagnosis of patients and the control of this outbreak. Therefore, a comprehensive investigation on 2019-nCoV genome variation is necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of current released RT-qPCR methods.
Keywords
Clinical aspects, diagnosis, treatment