ORF8 deletion
ORF8 deletion study
We investigated a SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in a local hospital, which was difficult to contain for over two months. By using virus genome sequencing we aimed to find out whether the outbreak has been caused by novel variants. We used nanopore sequencing on 46 outbreak samples with a modified ARTIC protocol employing 1200 bp long amplicons. We detected a long deletion of 168 nucleotides in the ORF8 gene in 44 samples from the hospital outbreak and validated it with Sanger sequencing.