As of March 2021, SARS-CoV-2 has infected 115 million people and caused over 2.56 million deaths. The emergence of mutants associated with changes to transmission of SARS-CoV-2 has shown that tracking and identification of SARS-CoV-2 variants is critical to establish an effective public health response.  Once a sample is detected as positive for COVID-19 using an RT-PCR assay, labs are encouraged to find whether the sample contains a Variant of Concern (VOC). NGS is ideal for this as its high resolution enables it to identify all mutations, known and unknown, providing insights to SARS-CoV-2 infection and transmission.

The NEXTFLEX® Variant-Seq™ SARS-CoV-2 workflow is optimized to easily identify all mutations in a SARS-CoV-2 sample. It utilizes an amplicon-based target enrichment workflow which offers many advantages over hybridization capture-based protocols, most notably speed, scalability, and cost.

Learning Objectives:

1. Understanding of the methods currently used to identify SARS-CoV-2 variants

2. NEXTFLEX® Variant-Seq™ SARS-CoV-2 workflow