rapid COVID-19 test

The Scientist asks Brigham and Women’s Hospital infectious disease specialist Lindsey Baden about testing for prior infections.

This month marks ten years since CRISPR-Cas9 was repurposed as a gene editing system, so we’re looking back at what has been accomplished in a decade of CRISPR editing.

The presence and spread of new, more-infectious and immune-evading variants show that the coronavirus is not done mutating.

The pandemic has yielded many lessons. One is that adequate and well-distributed diagnostics are key to battling disease outbreaks.

Performance-based pros and cons of common nanoparticle probes

Anecdotal reports and results from small studies on the diagnostics’ accuracy have prompted questions about the devices’ usage with the new variant, but researchers say more data are needed and emphasize the continued importance of SARS-CoV-2 testing.

Lateral flow tests for COVID-19 can be very accurate and specific when used as directed, but introducing acidic fluids can cause the tests’ detecting antibodies to clump, which may read as a positive result.