WebGyan: Ask Me Anything about Tapestry Pooling for COVID-19 Testing
8pm (IST) on 12 November 
 
Tapestry Pooling is a smart pooling method for qPCR testing that has been jointly developed at IIT Bombay, NCBS Bangalore, and inStem Bangalore. It allows 10X increase in testing throughput and gives individual results in a single round. The team has released a pooling guidance system at app.tapestry-pooling.com/sign-up that allows labs around the world to immediately adopt Tapestry Pooling. The method has been validated on over 3000 COVID-19 patient samples, and is a promising technology for enabling the security of office spaces and campuses at affordable costs as the economy reopens. The work has received attention in multiple international forums including a news report in Nature magazine, a review article in the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and a review article in the American Mathematical Society.
 
In this Ask-Me-Anything session of COVIDGyan, we speak with Manoj Gopalkrishnan and Dasaradhi Palakodeti, two of the PIs involved in this project. This is an opportunity for all of us to find out more about Tapestry Pooling, and ask the panelists any questions we may have about its workings. How is it possible to test 1000 samples with only 100 tests? Will this method have a loss in sensitivity? Is it too complicated to implement in a lab? Come ask the panelists, and find out.
 
Brief Bios:
 
Manoj Gopalkrishnan is a faculty member at IIT Bombay. His research interests span Computer Science and Biology with a focus on Molecular Programming and Machine Learning.
 
Dasaradhi Palakodeti is a faculty member at the DBT-Institute for Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine (inStem).
 
Live stream on the COVIDGyan Youtube channel: https://tinyurl.com/COVIDGyanlive