Detecting Respiratory Viruses with Twist and One Codex

Viral metagenomics has become an important area of study for microbiologists and is especially relevant in 2020 so far. Isolating and sequencing viral DNA or RNA has typically been a difficult and often time-consuming process. We recently partnered with Twist Bioscience to tackle this problem, with the release of One Codex analysis for the Twist Respiratory Virus Research Panel.

This blog post talks a little bit about how you can use the panel with One Codex for clinical viral metagenomics research. Our CEO Nick Greenfield will be co-hosting a webinar on Wednesday August 26^th at 8am PST (11am EST) with the team at Twist, so we’d highly recommend registering for that here:

Register for the Webinar

Wednesday August 26^th at 8am PST (11am EST)

The Twist Respiratory Virus Research Panel enables sensitive, multiplexed detection of 29 common human respiratory viruses in a single assay. Importantly, this hybrid capture enrichment workflow yields both presence/absence data and genome sequences that can empower deeper characterization, including identifying novel strains and monitoring genome evolution. This makes the panel ideal for studying co-infection of respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2. The panel is also designed to be extremely sensitive, with the ability to identify a virus from as few as 100 viral copies.

To help you analyze the sequencing data generated from the panel, we’ve developed a custom bioinformatics analysis and report. This report runs in minutes and gives you an easy-to-interpret view into which viruses were detected in your sample. You can see an example project here. Analyzing your Twist Respiratory Virus Research Panel data on One Codex will also give you access to all of our powerful tools for organizing your samples and sharing the results with your collaborators.

In addition to the PDF report we also make the full, segment-level sequence alignment results available through our API. You’ll see detailed statistics for every virus in the panel, and can customize the analysis with your own detection thresholds and interpretation. Here’s an example of what the results look like in our API:

{
    "coverage": 1.0,
    "depth": 724.1326957161489,
    "detection_status": "Detected",
    "identity": 0.9968648981095348,
    "name": "SARS-CoV-2",
    "segments": [
        {
            "accession": "NC_045512.2",
            "coverage": 1.0,
            "depth": 724.1326957161489,
            "identity": 0.9968648981095348,
            "length": 29903,
            "name": ""
        }
    ],
    "tax_id": "2697049",
    "total_length": 29903
}

Upon purchasing the panel from Twist, you’ll receive an email with a coupon code that you can redeem for the companion analysis on One Codex. Clicking the link in the email will automatically add the coupon to your One Codex account if you have one, or let you setup a free One Codex account for new users. We’ve also put together a helpful Getting Started guide to walk you through the process of uploading your sequencing data and running the Twist Respiratory Virus Research Panel analysis.

If you have any questions about the panel or analysis, feel free to reach out using the chat widget on this page or emailing us at hello@onecodex.com. And don’t forget to register for the upcoming webinar where we’ll be diving deeper on how you can use the Twist panel and One Codex analysis for your viral metagenomics research.

Please Note: The Twist Respiratory Virus Research Panel and the One Codex platform are intended for conduct of research only and are not designed, nor approved, to be used for patient care or diagnostic purposes.