SARS-CoV-2 N escape mutations do not affect rapid antigen testing EmoryUniversity SARSCoV2 COVID19 Mutations RapidAntigenTesting
By Dr. Liji Thomas, MDSep 16 2022Reviewed by Aimee Molineux The ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has led to over 6.4 million deaths, with fresh cases continuing to emerge. With the widespread vaccination drives, the spread of the virus was expected to decrease. The occurrence of breakthrough infections and reinfections proved this hope wrong.
Antibodies bind to epitopes, specific antigen regions that have a complementary structure to the binding domain of the antibody. Epitope mapping is a field that uses multiple techniques, such as structure determination, mass spectrometry, or site-directed mutagenesis, to help identify the escape mutation sites on the antigen. However, none of the methods used at present can directly measure the effect of a given mutation on antibody binding.
The result is a full picture of the escape mutations possible for each antibody, scored for escape potential at each region. The scores show how abundant the given mutation is in the group of cells expressing escape mutations. Thus, it shows how much effect each mutation has on antibody binding. Overall, this shows that a given epitope is sensitive to some substitutions but not others and highlights the detailed information available with this platform.
Rapid antigen tests operate based on two antibodies, one in a solid and the other in a mobile phase, with both being required to bind to the antigen for signal generation. Interestingly, the data from this study indicates that these diagnostic sets of antibodies bind to different epitopes, so that both are unlikely to have the same high escape score in a given N protein region.
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