Twist Bioscience Corporation announced the expansion of its growing portfolio of synthetic viral controls with the launch of a synthetic RNA control for H5N1 Influenza A, which is one of the causes of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) or bird flu, covering 99.9% of hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) genome regions. Positive controls provide quality control measures for the development, verification, and ongoing validation of both next-generation sequencing (NGS) and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assays. The Twist control contains synthetic RNA segments of the complete H5N1 HA and NA genome regions, which determine the subtype of the strain.

Twist provides a suite of research tools and NGS products, including custom controls and reference standards for H5N1 Influ influenza viruses, paramyxoviruses and enteroviruses as well as cfDNA controls for liquid biopsy assay and cancer research. Twist also offers the Twist Comprehensive Viral Research Panel, featured in a recent scientific publication for the detection of H5N1 in wastewater, which contains over one million probes for the targeted enrichment of over three thousand viral human pathogens.