Canterbury Health Laboratories together with members of the BOMB team have successfully trialled open source magnetic-bead purification of COVID-19 RNA from nasal/throat swabs of confirmed carriers. The method is based on established BOMB protocols using carboxylate-coated beads, with some minor modifications to suit collection of viral swabs and RNA purification from them.
This COVID-19 protocol is now available on BOMB.bio.

You can find it on the protocol page listed under
Or by clicking on this link which will take you directly to the protocol PDF.

Others world-wide are also working on similar BOMB-related ideas/protocols and are posting them on our website. To facilitate further community engagement, we have created a section of the Forum for COVID-19 – please ask questions about this and other protocols, give feedback and post your results from using it.

BOMB COVID-19 Forum

A big thank you to everyone who is able to help during these unprecedented times. Thank you to the scientist, the health workers but also to the people who help by staying home and keeping their distance. We are in this together!

The BOMB team wishes everyone, their families and friends well. We are all in this together.

The BOMB team wishes everyone out there a fantastic and productive 2020 full of exciting discoveries and numberless bead based extractions.

*edit: And what a year it has been so far. In light of the current global pandemic we have added brackets.

One of our most active BOMB community members has generously shared two protocols with us which he has been refining over the last months. The two brand new Plasmid extraction and purification protocols are now part of the ever more comprehensive list of BOMB protocols.

BOMB community protocol #5.3 is a Plasmid extraction protocol optimized for the use of the commercially available Sera-Mag beads for extraction from smaller quantities of cultured bacteria (MINIprep).

BOMB community protocol #5.4 represents a version of #5.3 adapted to be used for larger quantities of cultured media (MIDIprep).

A big thank you from the BOMB team.
Keep them coming.

*Update*

We are aware that CAPTCHAs can be mildly infuriating but we did not see any other way. By implementing this and other hurdles aimed at spam bots we have successfully minimized the number of new fake/spam topics to a mere trickle. Happy posting!

*Update*

The last couple of days we have seen an unprecedented amount of spam in our Forum and we apologize for giving one of Internets rather disagreeable aspects a stage.

Allowing everyone quick and easy access to the forum is of high importance to us. Unfortunately, this also makes it possible for bots and users with a less constructive agenda to register. Since the BOMB forum is intended as a place for mostly scientific exchange and strictly non vulgar conversations we have started to implement a list of words that will automatically trigger posts being held for moderation.

While we hope that this small first step will quench the current trickle of spam we will look into further options to fight of spam and unsolicited offers.

We are proud to present the first Magnetic Rack brought to you by a BOMB community member.

Malgorzata Cebrat has created a neat solution that allows for extractions of up to 16x 1.5ml tubes without having to remove the tubes individually for washing steps.
You will find all the necessary information on the Protocol page under “Printed Racks”.

We have further refined our #2.1 MNP silica coating protocol, version 1.3 is now available.
Steps 1-4 have been changed. TEOS are being added later, leading to even better results.

Have you already been a big fan of #2.1_1.2 and cant wait to test version 1.3?
Or, maybe coating you very own Beads is a bit too much DIY but you love all our other protocols?
Let us and the science community out there know. We are on Facebook, twitter, Instagram, reddit and there is even a BOMB forum.

We discovered that protocol #3.1_BOMB_MNP_coating_carboxyl_groups_V1.0 was missing SDS in the list of required chemicals. It is however correctly mentioned in the description of the procedure on the nextpage.

Version 1.1 now contains the updated list of required chemicals.
No further changes were made.

Thank you to everyone who was already using and trusting our protocols and ideas while everything was still in pre-print. While we would not have chosen the fantastic bioRxiv.org option if we wouldn’t have been sure that the protocols provided are of the highest quality, we are happy to announce that the core BOMB publication is now fully peer reviewed and published in PLOS|Biology.

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000107