week 6 blog reflection
This article covered the topic of optimization of primer sets for detection of SARS COVID 2 of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) using PCR. I guess there comes a time in everyone’s life where you have to make a decision, and, sometimes, those decisions aren’t easy. Maybe one day you decide you want to eat cereal for breakfast. But when you pour the cereal into your empty bowl, it makes a sound that reminds you of your pet dog which passed away last year. They used to come to the counter and raise their head up to see what the noise was. But now there’s no one there to raise their head up. It’s just you and your cereal. For some split second you have a strange thought, the silence of the narrow hallway they used to barrel through to greet you isn’t strange at all; not anymore, now that silence is normal. A new normal. And why does this thought bother you so much? Why today? Why not yesterday? And will you remember tomorrow? Or, will one day, your heart be silent too; void of the sounds of the forgotten things you used to love, in favor of a new normal, a final normal – emptiness? In the same way, even if you design your primers in a way that seem to be appropriate, the actual results may surprise, and disappoint you, and make you want to think of better times. The impetus of this paper was to design a better set of primers for the detection of covid, in particular, the authors believed existing primers were too susceptible to false-positives. Yet, arguably, false-positives are preferable to false-negatives in the case of covid detection, and, it is not uncommon for methods of decreasing false-positives to result in the rise of false-negatives. Regardless, in the formulation of the idea for this paper, I suppose in the creation of this paper the authors saw an opportunity to increase the utility, and expanded this paper, rather than to focus on a specific primer set, to be more of a guide for creation of primers for covid or, as they put it, ‘any infectious disease’. The paper is straight forward, with multiple illustrations and includes a flow-diagram as well as detailed instructions, and reflections on efficient primer creation practices for both traditional PCR and real-time PCR, including multiplexing. It is related to eDNA in that Shane Farrell is involved in creating primers for detection of taxa in eDNA samples at Bigelow, and chose this paper to better educate himself on good primer creation practices.