ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Cell. Infect. Microbiol.
Sec. Clinical and Diagnostic Microbiology and Immunology
Volume 15 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcimb.2025.1524025
Reality Check: Testing the in silico Predictions of False Negative Results Due to Mutations in SARS-CoV-2 PCR assays Using Templates with Mismatches in vitro
Provisionally accepted- 1MRIGlobal, Kansas City, United States
- 2Division of Bacterial, Parasitic and Allergenic Products, Office of Vaccines Research and Review, Biologics Evaluation and Research, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Silver Spring, United States
- 3Defense Biological Product Assurance Office (DBPAO), Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defense (JPEO-CBRND), Enabling Biotechnologies, Frederick, United States
- 4Division of Microbiology, Office of In Vitro Diagnostics, Office of Product Evaluation and Quality, Center for Devices and Radiological Health, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Silver Spring, Maryland, United States
- 5Joint Research and Development, Inc. (JRAD), Stafford, Virginia, United States
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Molecular diagnostic assays are critical tools to test, diagnose and treat infectious and other diseases. For example, PCR test results have been extremely valuable during the COVID-19 pandemic, not only to provide appropriate health care for infected and symptomatic individuals as needed, but also for implementing public health measures such as test, trace and isolate infected and asymptomatic individuals to prevent further transmission of the virus. Sustained transmission and unhindered proliferation of the pathogen across the population during a continuous, ongoing pandemic such as COVID-19, resulted in many variants with mutations. These mutations may lead to signature erosion, a phenomenon wherein diagnostic tests developed using the genomic sequence of an earlier version of the pathogen, may fail and cause a false negative (FN) result in a sample containing a new variant. We and others have developed applications such as PSET (PCR Signature Erosion Tool) to monitor the performance of diagnostic tests in silico using pathogen genomic sequences. Here, we present and discuss the data on wet lab testing of the in silico predictions to assess assay performance with mismatches in assay signatures. We found that the majority of the assays performed without drastic reduction in assay performance even with mismatches in primer and probe regions as measured by PCR efficiencies and Ct value shifts. We identified critical residues and positions and types of changes that may impact assay performance. Despite the extensive accumulation of mutations in SARS-CoV-2 variants over the course of the various waves of the pandemic, most PCR assays proved to be extremely robust and continued to perform well even with drastic changes and signature erosion.
Keywords: signature erosion, real time PCR, qPCR, SARS-CoV-2, PCR efficiency, in silicoprediction, False Negative (FN), wet lab testing
Received: 26 Nov 2024; Accepted: 07 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Otwell, Knight, Coryell, Stone, Davis, Necciai, Carlson, Yi and Sozhamannan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Brittany Knight, bknight@mriglobal.org
Shanmuga Sozhamannan, shanmuga.sozhamannan.ctr@army.mil
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