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Leftover drops in vials of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine allowed a group of researchers from Stanford University to determine the sequence of the mRNA for SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein that is used in the immunization, Motherboard reported March 29. The sequence has been posted on the open-access website GitHub.
“Sharing of sequence information for broadly used therapeutics has substantial benefit in design of improved clinical tools and precise diagnostics,” the authors write in their post. They explain that knowing the vaccine’s sequence will allow diagnostic labs to more easily differentiate between RNA from the vaccine versus that from an actual viral infection.
“As the vaccine has been rolling out, these sequences have begun to show up in many different investigational and diagnostic studies,” the researchers tell Motherboard by email. “Knowing these sequences and having the ability to differentiate them from other RNAs in analyzing future biomedical data sets ...
