Preliminary in silico assessment of the specificity of published molecular assays and design of new assays using the available whole genome sequences of 2019-nCoV

Updated to 565,366 COVID-19 WGS from GISAID.

Table 1. Results from PSET analysis. The five Noblis assays were compared alongside the four assays from Corman and three assays from the CDC. Along with assays from China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Japan, France, South Korea, and Singapore. Each assay was tested using SARS-CoV-2 as the intended target. All off-target hits (TN, PF, FP) are to entries in NCBI BLAST databases (nt and env_nt). *edited 2/2 to include 5 additional assays.

assay PT TP FN Percent True PF FP TN
Noblis.12 550666 12329 2371 99.58% 0 0 680
Noblis.40 556093 7876 1397 99.75% 0 1 1420
Noblis.42 557860 4643 2863 99.49% 0 2 1136
Noblis.44 555976 5236 4154 99.27% 0 1 1786
Noblis.57 550426 6426 8514 98.49% 0 1 853
ncov_e_gene 559501 2135 3730 99.34% 361 15 53
ncov_n_gene 543949 15931 5486 99.03% 0 340 72
ncov_rdrp_1 0 560329 5037 99.11% 433 105 5967
ncov_rdrp_2 16 560651 4699 99.17% 2 73 5916
cdc_n1 542650 19854 2862 99.49% 0 2 381
cdc_n2 542621 17193 5552 99.02% 0 1 372
cdc_n3 543000 19063 3303 99.42% 1 353 36
China_N 301247 39356 224763 60.24% 0 2 691
China_ORF1ab 547989 4790 12587 97.77% 1 0 367
France_nCoV_IP2 556064 4682 4620 99.18% 1 0 367
France_nCoV_IP4 554800 8835 1731 99.69% 0 0 1190
HKU-N 545445 14138 5783 98.98% 327 33 34
HKU-ORF1b-nsp14 558319 4608 2439 99.57% 324 29 452
Japan_NIID_2019-nCOV_N 0 559362 6004 98.94% 0 0 384
Japan_NIID_WH-1_F24381 551867 7153 6346 98.88% 0 1 601
Japan_NIID_WH-1_F501 555798 5516 4052 99.28% 0 1 370
Japan_NIID_WH-1_F509 551045 10081 4240 99.25% 1 0 369
Japan_NIID_WH-1_Seq_F24383 551598 7371 6397 98.87% 0 0 606
Japan_NIID_WH-1_Seq_F519 548791 6863 9712 98.28% 0 1 369
Japan_WuhanCoV-spk1 554212 4769 6385 98.87% 1 1 594
Thailand_WH-NIC_N 551265 11160 2941 99.48% 0 2 375
Chan-N 543747 15662 5957 98.95% 4 3 353
Chan-ORF1ab 9 558836 6521 98.85% 0 5 2
Chan-S 550675 5931 8760 98.45% 5 0 2
Niu-E 555439 6058 3869 99.32% 26 359 0
Won-E 7 561958 3401 99.40% 0 384 1
Won-N 548247 12021 5098 99.10% 8 7 358
Won-ORF1ab 557321 3243 4802 99.15% 5 2 313
Won-S 543572 3507 18287 96.77% 5 1 0
Yip-ORF1ab 554920 4405 6041 98.93% 5 1 1
Young-N 1 562014 3351 99.41% 0 5 1
Young-ORF1ab 553503 9608 2255 99.60% 5 1 0
Young-S 442944 19378 103044 81.77% 4 1 0
C1_COV_ORF1a 541039 8523 15804 97.20% 0 0 0
C2_COV_ORF1b 547608 14381 3377 99.40% 0 0 0
C3_COV_ORF3a 497339 51945 16082 97.16% 0 0 0
C4_COV_ORF8 449151 105492 10723 98.10% 0 0 0
C5_COV_S_gene 551794 7443 6129 98.92% 0 0 0