Summary

We have recently developed the artic-measles/400/v1.0.0 primer scheme (labs). This scheme has been designed to account for all genetic variation present across all Measles virus (MeV) serotypes, allowing it to be used for samples of unknown (clinical samples) or mixed (environmental surveillance) serotypes.

This scheme also utilises 400bp amplicons, providing very high sensitivity, enabling a range of use cases, while also using the familiar ARTIC LoCost native barcoding library preparation used for SARS-CoV-2.

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Design of the scheme

For in-depth details about how the scheme was designed, please see the preprint. In summary, we used the latest version of primalscheme to produce multiple primers for each primer site to account for the diversity present in genomes of all serotypes.

Validation

We performed initial validation in-house by testing the scheme against standards for 4 serotypes (A, B3, D4 and D5) and produced full coverage data with 100% base accuracy. Other collaborators have used the scheme with effective results (further communications incoming).