McMaster researchers developed 'fish hooks' to catch samples of coronavirus

Researchers at McMaster University have developed a set of "fish hooks" capable of isolating the new coronavirus and have quickly released the new tool to the international community to help battle the outbreak.

The innovation will help health scientists determine how the COVID-19 is spreading andtrack whether it's evolving.

"The reason we want to look at the genome of the virus is to make sure it's not changing as it passes through people and populations and possibly becoming more infective or more dangerous," explainedAndrew McArthur, an associate professor and computational biologist at theMichael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research.

Those "hooks"allows scientists to do the"detective work" to find out how it transmits between people and how well it survives outside the body, as well aslearn more about its properties usingnext-generation sequencing, he added.

The urgency of the outbreak and the fact McMaster doesn't have a sample of the cornoavirus led McArthurand his team to skip the typical peer-review and clinical evaluation stages and instead release their sequences publicly right away.

"Right now we just don't have that kind of time," he explained in an interview with CBC.

Instead the researchers are planning to work with SunnybrookHospital for future testing andare relying on scientists around the world toperform their own experiments.

"I'm hopeful someone in China or Italy maybe will be the first one," explained McArthur."As long as someone does it I'll be content."

The "hooks" aren't aimed at diagnosing patients. They work by attachingwith the virus's DNA, allowing them tocherry pickvirus from among the other types of DNA included inbiological samples. And that's not any easy task.

"The molecules you're after like the virus are really rare. It's a tiny fraction. It's really much worse than a needle in a haystack," said McArthur.

Typically a virus is isolatedusing costly and time consuming processes such asculturing it in cells atcontained labs by trained specialists an optionthat isn't always available or affordable in countries that have more limited resources.

"Not every municipality or country will have specialized labs and researchers, not to mention that culturing a virus is dangerous," he stated in a media release from the university. "This tool removes some of these barriers and allows for more widespread testing and analyses."

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The team was able to put together the "hooks"so quickly becauseJalees Nasir, a PhD candidate in biochemistry and biomedical sciences at McMaster, was already working with Sunnybrookto develop a tool to isolate respiratory viruses when the outbreak began.

Nasir immediately pivoted his project, creating a "sequence recipe" to isolate COVID-19 specifically.

"When you have samples from a patient, for example, it can consist of a combination of virus, bacteria and human material, but you're really only interested in the virus," Nasir said in the release. "It's almost like a fishing expedition. We are designing baits that we can throw into the sample as hooks and pull out the virus from that mixture."

Now David Speicher, a postdoctoral fellow in McArthur's lab, issharingdetails of the technology with the clinical epidemiology community around the globe.

McArthur and his team aren't just sharing their tool. They're also making behind the scenes work that went into it available to the public so that a sort of mass peer-review is possible.

"We designed this tool and are releasing it for use by others," he said.

"In part, we're relying on our track record of knowing what we are doing, but we're also relying on people who have the virus samples in hand being able to do the validation experiment so that it's reliable."