boxofgrifs mentioned you in a post
@wildcrisis-personal human ImPacT testing...sounds dangerous! Lemme know hoe the science turns out~
hang on im suffering a random case of insomnia so HERE’S SOME LEARNIN’ TIME
So I work in a PCR lab that runs testing on research animals. Labs from all over the world send us specimen types (swabs, tumors, spleens, feces, cell lines, etc) and select what they’re testing for. Some of them just wanna make sure their animals are healthy so they just test for parasites and stuff. Others want to make sure that their animals aren’t contaminated with any specific pathogen, since there are huge lines/colonies of mice and rats that are bred to have specific genes shut on and off.
And others are testing to make sure that whatever they’re trying to make happen is actually happening.
So, with PCR, we can extract DNA from anything and if even 1 copy of DNA from whatever we’re testing for is present (like, pinworms for example), we can detect it.
The sample gets processed and the DNA gets extracted, then we create plates to test the pure DNA. First, in the plate, you add a mixture that contains two primers (a forward and a reverse) and a probe. The primers will attach to the sequence of DNA for that particular test and cut it out, and the machine will multiply it. The probe is essentially a coloring agent that causes that specific sequence to light up when heated up, which can be read on a machine called a light cycler. So, once you fill up your plate with the appropriate primer-probe mixes for what you wanna test for, then you pipette the sample in and BOOM. It’s ready to go get eaten by a light cycler and heated up and such to force the little DNA sequences to pop up, if they’re present.
I KNOW LITERALLY NONE OF THIS MAKES SENSE FOR THE MOST PART I AM JUST RAMBLING ABOUT WORK.
cause despite my workplace being STUPID, my job is fairly fascinating i think.
But yes, a human impact panel is used to either test cell lines for potential contaminates or its used as confirmatory testing. That panel consists of different types of HIV, meningitis, hepatitis, and other things you probably don’t want. Thankfully, most of the time, they’ve been deactivated by a particular buffer when we receive them.
And sometimes random human brain sample from Germany comes in and they want to confirm all the different scary things that person died from. THAT ONE WAS WEIRD.
