Staff Training and Development
Commitment to quality is key in our success. High quality in our services to clients can only be achieved when our staff are appropriately trained and kept abreast with new techniques and knowledge. We are happy to share that two of our outstanding senior staff members (Teresa Susanto and Lorraine Rivera) recently completed a short training course in the UK organized by Public Health England. The course, ‘Novel and Dangerous Pathogens Training’ is aimed at Containment Level 2 / Biosafety Level 2 laboratory users with a basic background in microbiology and scientists familiar with virology assays but who require wet-lab virology training.
A brief summary of the course is shown below.
- Introduction of Virology: Virus definition, structures and classification; immune responses and type of infections.
- Cell Culture: How to generate, propagate, and maintain cell bank storage.
- Hazard Criteria and categorization of microbes: How to categorise the hazard group and laboratory containment level.
- Handling and extracting virus nucleic acid (ie. RNA vs DNA)
- Visualising viruses by Electron Microscopy
- qPCR: real time PCR- Designing, validation and optimisation using Step One Plus qPCR machine; hands on practical on RNAs extraction of virus and performed real time PCR, then analysis of the qPCR result.
- Virus study: Infection of confluent flask, removal of virus, virus harvest/inactivation TCID50 infection; Fixation of TCID50 plates and visualisation of infections; Haemagglutination assay and results analysis
This course allows them to better understand and assist our clients in the various type of Virology tests that they may require. Some these tests include Extraneous Viral Agent testing, Virus titre determination using our real-time PCR machine.