Primer Development/ COVID19 review
This was such an interesting class discussion! I was really glad we could discuss as a class some of the important aspects to include when you’re validating a primer set. I think there’s definitely more that could be said about this process since it can be a bit complex, but it was a good base coverage. The paper by Park et al. (2020) provided a good overview of some of the steps, although as we discussed in class I do think they could have included some more testing against closely related viruses when testing their set for COVID19. This was mostly a review for me, but I had fun discussing with my classmates and walking through some of the details, as it stretched my thinking a bit.
The Biomeme was a nice addition to lecture. Hands on demonstrations of concepts related to the lecture/ week are always such a good way for people to visualize and learn. I think it was cool for people to see a technology that could be directly applied to their research/ outreach/ conservation!