Reflection on PCR & Primer Design
I was really excited to learn how to use Primer BLAST this week. I had been using it a little to check to see whether a metabarcoding primer would amplify targeted species. I had a vague idea of what parameters to look for, but learning the specific terms has helped immensely. The primer that I will be (indirectly) working with is from MiFish, and it’s been amazing to see how many different terrestrial organisms the primer can amplify. I’m very excited to learn about building metabarcoding libraries next week, as my group and I have found about 50 local target species that can be amplified by this primer.
It was also incredibly helpful to learn about the PCR and primer design process through the lens of COVID-19 testing. I knew that PCR tests are very sensitive, and that early COVID tests had produced multiple false positive detections, but I didn’t know why this was. And seeing a real-time qPCR COVID test be performed in the Biomeme was great!