SARS-CoV-2 Variant Identification Using a Genome Tiling Array and Genotyping Probes

Abstract

With over three million deaths worldwide attributed to the respiratory disease COVID-19 caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, it is essential that continued efforts be made to track the evolution and spread of the virus globally. We previously presented a rapid and cost-effective method to sequence the entire SARS-CoV-2 genome with 95% coverage and 99.9% accuracy. This method is advantageous for identifying and tracking variants in the SARS-CoV-2 genome when compared to traditional short read sequencing methods which can be time consuming and costly. Herein we present the addition of genotyping probes to our DNA chip which target known SARS-CoV-2 variants. The incorporation of the genotyping probe sets along with the advent of a moving average filter have improved our sequencing coverage and accuracy of the SARS-CoV-2 genome.