Let’s have a look at the methods section of the paper.
2 rounds of 45 cycles of PCR?
This is what you do if you want to make polymerase slippage errors near GC rich triplet repeats.
People this library illiterate shouldn’t have the keys to $20K NovaSeq runs.
Having engineered very accurate sequencers, to address PCR polymerase error, you must utilize DNA barcodes that get attached to your PCR products in the first cycle of PCR. Any barcode that over amplifies through the PCR process is discounted.
While I suspect omicron is a directed evolution lab experiment that leaked….
We now have the added complexity of there being patients that have both C19 and the pseudouridine based mRNAs.
Do these recombine/strand switch?
Lots of degenerate bases = more noise in spike.