Laboratory Reagent Contamination Threatens Accuracy Of Infectious Disease Research

A caller study warns that contamination from laboratory reagents could beryllium misleading scientists worldwide successful their hunt for emerging infectious diseases. Researchers recovered that silica membranes-commonly utilized successful nucleic acerb extraction kits-can harbor parvoviruses and different viral contaminants, creating mendacious virus–host associations successful metagenomic sequencing (mNGS) data. These misleading links tin impact objective diagnostics, zoonotic surveillance, and nationalist wellness responses.

In mNGS analyses of diligent samples from aggregate regions successful China, nan squad detected dozens of parvovirus sequences that intimately matched viruses antecedently attributed to bats, birds, pangolins, and different animals. Follow-up investigations revealed that these sequences originated not from patients but from nan silica columns and definite sampling tubes utilized successful laboratory workflows. Testing crossed 28 commercialized kits showed contamination from 13 different viral families, pinch Parvoviridae being nan astir frequent.

To reside this wide problem, nan researchers developed nan Panoramic Virus Discovery Data Chain (PVDDC)-a high-quality, traceable dataset integrating viral genomic data, laboratory workflows, reagent records, and big associations. Combining large information curation pinch ample connection exemplary ChatGPT‐4o, PVDDC standardizes virus–host relationships and enables contamination tracing. They besides launched nan Parvovirus Database (ParvoDB，http://web3.mgc.ac.cn:8080/parvodb/), a nationalist level pinch devices for strain search, quality parvovirus records, contamination monitoring, and host–virus network.

By applying this framework, nan squad recovered that galore parvoviruses linked to humans successful nationalist databases deficiency robust experimental grounds and whitethorn alternatively beryllium artifacts of reagent contamination. Only a mini subset-such arsenic quality bocavirus and parvovirus B19-has strong, well-supported quality associations.

Importantly, nan PVDDC model is not constricted to parvoviruses-it tin beryllium adapted to analyse and mitigate contamination for a wide scope of viral taxa, making it a versatile instrumentality for improving nan reliability of mNGS-based pathogen surveillance. The authors promote researchers worldwide to lend contamination grounds to ParvoDB, helping to grow its scope and fortify world capacity to detect, trace, and correctly property viruses successful objective and biology studies.