Twist Bioscience NGS | Fixed Panels | Comprehensive Viral Research Panel

We pulled reference sequences from the RefSeq, FluDB, and VIPR databases to design the 1,052,421 unique probes that make up the Twist Comprehensive Viral Research Panel. 

The panel broadly spans every viral family that contains at least one virus known to affect humans, including adenoviruses, coronaviruses, flaviviruses, noroviruses, influenza viruses, and more. 

In addition to targeting human-infective viruses, the panel also covers animal viruses (e.g., bat coronaviruses). This enables the discovery of novel viral species regardless of origin.

Its sheer breadth allows the Twist Comprehensive Viral Research Panel to detect novel and evolved viral strains, including those related to a June 2020 outbreak of H1N1 influenza in swine workers.

Natural selection of coronavirus spike and influenza hemagglutinin (HA) glycoproteins in animals facilitated the zoonotic transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and H1N1 influenza to humans. 

Here, we show that the Twist Comprehensive Viral Research Panel can be used to successfully detect these hard-to-capture sequences, including the spike region of a recently discovered coronavirus (RoBat-CoV GCCDC1 Singapore) and a HA segment isolated from a June 2020 outbreak of H1N1 influenza in swine workers. 

Our panel resulted in >99.8% coverage of each sequence to at least 1x depth.
 

We defined the mismatch sensitivity of the Twist Comprehensive Viral Research Panel by generating a series of HA segments to contain defined levels of sequence variation ranging from 5% to 30% variation from a wild-type HA segment.

Total capture was achieved at 1x coverage in samples with up to 10% sequence variation. Together, these data demonstrate that the Twist Comprehensive Viral Research Panel can capture highly evolved viral sequences. 

Multiplex detection of viruses is possible with the Twist Comprehensive Viral Research Panel, enabling metagenomic applications in a variety of sample types. 

In a co-infection assay, the panel successfully captured four different virus types (Astrovirus - ssRNA, BK virus - dsDNA, Bocavirus - ssDNA and Picobirnavirus - dsRNA) spiked into human RNA with only 1.2 M reads.