New Delhi, Jan 05: At the time when cases of news COVID variant, Omicron, has been spreading widely in the country, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), approved COVID kit, OmiSure, that will be used to detect Omicron. .

 

The kit is jointly manufactured by Tata Medical and Diagnostics, while it is developed by the US-based scientific instrumentation company Thermo Fisher.

 

 

The newly approved testing kit is expected to detect the presence of the new variant of the coronavirus in patients. Currently, Omicron patients are detected only after genome sequencing. But this test can help eliminate that step and detection can be done during the testing. It can detect the Omicron variant as well as other variants of SARS-CoV2 reported so far.

 

 

 

Since the Omicron variant underwent several mutations in the S-gene, it uses the S Gene Target Failure (SGTF) strategy to detect the variant. ‘S’ Gene, ORF, ‘N’ gene, Rdrp, ‘E’ gene, etc are the viral genes that are targeted to detect the COVID-19 virus. In the case of the Omicron variant, the ‘S’ gene does not get detected in Thermo Fisher’s Taq Path RT-PCR test due to mutation in the gene, while other gene targets such as the ORF gene and N gene get detected.

 

At present, there are 1,45,582 active coronavirus cases in India whereas 3,42,95,407 patients have recovered and 4,81,893 deaths have been reported. Also, 1892 cases of Omicron have been reported from 23 Indian states and union territories.

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