UoH is Covid testing centre

CITY BUREAU

Hyderabad  18.04.2020

University of Hyderabad (UoH) has been identified as a Covid-19 testing centre under the city clusters identified by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT).

The university at the earliest will identify 15 technical personnel for data entry, sample sorting, aliquoting and coordination with other testing labs, and be ready for testing once the ICMR Approved Testing Kits and required reagents are made available by the coordinating institution, varsity officials said. UoH will be conducting these tests at a separate BSL-2 laboratory at CDFD and the volunteers will undergo training at CCMB, before undertaking the actual testing. Volunteers have to be well-trained in handling RNA isolation and performing qPCR and who are willing to undertake the testing at CDFD which will be coordinated by the School of Life Sciences, UoH, a press release said. To scale up the testing capacity for Covid-19, testing centres are being established by research institutes and laboratories of Government Ministries and Departments, Universities, IITs, IISERs, and other Institutes of Eminence under the Central and State government. As part of this initiative, the cluster in Hyderabad consists of the Center for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics, CSIR-Centre for Cellular Molecular Biology, National Institute of Animal Biotechnology (NIAB); CSIR-IICT in addition to UoH. The coordinating institution for Hyderabad is CSIR-CCMB.

The city/regional clusters of testing centres will serve the city and State in testing of Covid-19 samples. Institutes and labs which have the capacity and expertise for both sample collection, handling/processing (BSL-2 facility) and testing (RT-PCR) serve as hubs and they will involve a number of laboratories, the release added.