PRINCE KUMAR
Ranchi, Jan 29: OmiSure test kit will be made available soon to RIMS which will help in identifying the Omicron strain of the virus.
Dr Dipendra Kumar Sinha of RIMS said that the kit will be available soon at RIMS and it will help in identifying the particular strain of the virus.
However, the head of the Microbiologist Department at RIMS, Dr Manoj Kumar said that it is not a replacement of the genome sequencing machine and can only detect a single strain of the virus.
“As soon as the new strain comes, the kit will not be useful and a new kit will be required as per the strain of the virus,” Kumar said.
The OmiSure RT-PCR test kit has been developed by Tata Medical and Diagnostics (TMD) and is described as the first of its kind in the world.
Like the existing RT-PCR test, the TMD kit, too, relies on nasal and oral swab samples and is compatible with all standard PCR machines being used in India.
The RT-PCR test is considered to be the ‘gold standard for detecting Covid-19. Amid the emergence of Omicron, it has been found that in certain cases, a positive RT-PCR test can also give a good idea if the infection was caused by this variant. But not all RT-PCR tests can identify Omicron which, further, is not the only variant thus susceptible to detection.
The Reverse transcription-polymerase Chain Reaction, or RT-PCR, test works by detecting the presence of specific genetic material in a pathogen. In the case of the novel coronavirus, most RT-PCR tests seek out genes in its spike protein, which the virus uses to invade human cells.
Now, to ensure that the test is accurate, more than one spike gene is targeted so that even if a mutation may have changed one of the genes, the other would still get captured in the test. That has proved to be an advantage of sorts when it comes to detecting an infection with Omicron since one of its specific mutations is not captured by certain RT-PCR tests.
