The BiosearchTech Blog

Darshna "Dusty" Vyas has been a Senior Scientist at LGC specialising in plant genetics for the past 8 years Her contributions on the team have enabled the translation of LGC, Biosearch Technologies to the global plant breeding community in all species ranging across diverse sample types including wheat, cocoa, rubber, rice and aquaculture. Dusty's desire to understand our customers’ requirements and develop innovative products and services at Biosearch Technologies to improve global crop development isn't just a professional objective, but a personal one. 

Following up with the panelists from our recent COVID-19 webinar, Part 3 of 3

In the previous two blog posts in this series, we shared insights from two of the panelists from our webinar, “How to establish COVID-19 diagnostics and keep up with demand,” covering testing scale up and issues related to sensitivity and accuracy. In this final post of the series, we ask our panelists to address questions about some of the most pressing issues of today and the near future.

Following up with the panelists from our recent COVID-19 webinar, Part 2 of 3

In the face of a rapidly evolving pandemic, testing labs are constantly having to adjust and adapt their existing workflows. In our recent webinar, “How to establish COVID-19 diagnostics and keep up with demand,” we assembled a panel of experts to share insights that can help testing labs find a path forward. In this continuation of our webinar follow-up conversation with panelists Eric Chow, PhD, and Kathleen Campau, PhD, we discuss questions from the webinar audience related to SARS-CoV-2 testing sensitivity and accuracy.

Following up with the panelists from our recent COVID-19 webinar, Part 1 of 3

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented testing labs around the world with a number of new challenges, and the community is still working out the best ways to meet the incredible testing need. To help labs continue to refine and improve their SARS-CoV-2 testing processes and workflows, LGC, Biosearch Technologies recently held an information-rich webinar, 'How to establish COVID-19 diagnostics and keep up with demand', with a panel of experts from both industry and academia. Here we follow-up with two of the panelists, Eric Chow, PhD, and Kathleen Campau, PhD, with additional questions from the audience on scaling up. 

As countries worldwide begin to ease lockdown restrictions during the pandemic and prepare to return to “normal” without a vaccine for COVID-19 or effective treatments in place, prudent testing measures need to be taken to suppress new infections. It is critical to test more people rapidly to identify who is infected, track them to avoid the disease from spreading and tracing with whom they have been in contact. Reverse transcription PCR (RT-PCR) testing method currently represents the majority of COVID-19 molecular diagnostics that helps identify individuals who are infected at the time of the test.

Brassica  rapa crops are important sources of food, feed, and fuel in many parts of the world and provide a unique opportunity for investigating plant genome evolution. In 2018, the Food and Agricultural Organization reported a global production of cabbages and other brassicas to be more than 103 million tonnes.¹ Disease and environmental stress can reduce crop yield and quality, so plant breeders are using genome-wide molecular markers like SNPs to make a background selection and identify target genes involved in high nutritional quality, disease resistance and yield in order to speed up the breeding process in Brassica rapa crops. 

It may seem strange that a company known for transforming the global seed breeding industry is uniquely positioned to help COVID-19 testing labs overcome bottlenecks and rapidly scale-up testing. However, when you look at the problems testing labs are facing, it becomes clear that LGC, Biosearch Technologies has all the right tools for a rapid and robust pandemic response, even with the need to validate our Research Use Only (RUO) products for diagnostic testing. Today’s significantly altered conditions require new approaches and new solutions.

We’re not rejecting you, just your oligo

PCR is arguably one of the most enabling technologies of modern molecular biology, with a sensitivity that can detect incredibly small amounts of DNA. However, the sensitivity of the method is also one of the biggest challenges—when you can detect just a few molecules of DNA, inadvertent contamination can give you misleading data. Issues with contamination are especially critical in qPCR reactions for molecular diagnostics testing, such as for SARS-CoV-2 detection, where any contaminating template DNA, even if it’s just long fragments, can generate false positive results.

LGC, Biosearch Technologies is excited to announce the expansion of SeqSNP targeted genotyping by sequencing (GBS) services in North America. Advancing AgBio projects from our Middleton, Wisconsin, USA, location, these services provide an all-inclusive, cost-effective targeted GBS solution that requires no setup costs or upfront sample number commitment.

On March 25, 2020, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) held the first of a series of virtual town halls they will be holding to answer technical questions about developing, validating, and implementing tests to detect SARS-CoV-2. Elizabeth Hillebrenner and Timothy Stenzel, PhD, from the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) provided an overview of the policies governing the development and deployment of SARS-CoV-2 tests as well as expanded guidance on the existing policies. One of the more interesting points they covered were the different scenarios where diagnostic test developers do not need to file for an emergency use authorisation (EUA), which the FDA put in place to expedite increased testing capabilities. We’ve summarised those scenarios here, although we recommend you use the links at the end of this post to see the source material from the FDA if you are considering any of these pathways.*