How do they diagnose coronavirus in patients?

Science
#1

Since we at Makerspace like to know how things work, I found a paper detailing how government approved diagnostic labs actually test patient samples for the 2019-Novel Coronavirus.

https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download

In a nutshell, they use real-time PCR (polymerase chain reaction) to amplify two regions of the viral RNA, plus a control sample of human RNA (to verify the amplification worked). The same machine detects if the RNA was actually amplified.

And here is how real-time PCR works:

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#2

BTW we actually have two conventional PCR machines collecting dust in the Science area.

Here’s the difference between conventional PCR and real-time PCR:

We couldn’t do coronavirus testing, but we could check to see if a potato is genetically modified or not:

http://www.jove.com/science-education/10044/testing-for-genetically-modified-foods

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