Genomic Surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 Using Long-Range PCR Primers

Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is crucial in the surveillance of the COVID-19 pandemic. Several primer schemes have been developed to sequence the ~30,000 nucleotide SARS-CoV-2 genome that use a multiplex PCR approach to amplify cDNA copies of the viral genomic RNA. Midnight primers and ARTIC V4.1 primers are the most popular primer schemes that can amplify segments of SARS-CoV-2 (400 bp and 1200 bp, respectively) tiled across the viral RNA genome. Mutations within primer binding sites and primer-primer interactions can result in amplicon dropouts and coverage bias, yielding low-quality genomes with 'Ns' inserted in the missing amplicon regions, causing inaccurate lineage assignments, and making it challenging to monitor lineage-specific mutations in Variants of Concern (VoCs). This study uses seven long-range PCR primers with an amplicon size of ~4500 bp to tile across the complete SARS-CoV-2 genome. One of these regions includes the full-length S-gene by using a set of flanking primers. Using a small set of long-range primers to sequence SARS-CoV-2 genomes reduces the possibility of amplicon dropout and coverage bias.