ZMay61 Reflection Week 6
On this week’s edition of eDNA, we walked through the importance of creating and working with different primers and probes along with the specifications that come with analyses. Although multiple programs and websites aid in the construction and creation of primers, it is important to play around and even shop around for ones that specifically fit the need of the question at hand. I had run through and played with some of these before and ‘fact checked’ some other species of interest that may be of concern when designing. The amount of thought and design of these was way more compelling when looking for specific species when there can error in applying. Using some ‘almost’ species specific primers does not guarantee the best results, such as multiple species may be ‘coded’ a certain way (tree of life, family, order, etc.). This brief, yet highly complex creation is important to yield findings. This research on COVID-19 seemed quick, as the results were relatively straight forward for this design, they were also complex in how the authors used these methods. I do however wish there was more testing in regards to the single SARS that they used for more convincing data. But due to the severity of COVID a study like this in the amount of time was impressive. The multiplexing samples were interesting to see and I had not known about this method, or at least that was the name for it. This can obviously be beneficial to the wallet, but the results to this method are a bit concerning to me not fully understanding the entire process. Can probes designed for separate entities reflect in the results of a gel or peaks in the results? Could they impact what they amplify and produce strange findings? -assuming a pilot study testing a lot of species and how probes and primers interact with each other in the PCR process. Down the rabbit hole we go.