Figure - PMC

Skip to main content

An official website of the United States government

Here's how you know

Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

View full-text article in PMC

. 2023 Sep 27;8:141. doi: 10.1038/s41541-023-00742-7

Search in PMC
Search in PubMed
View in NLM Catalog
Add to search

© The Author(s) 2023

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

PMC Copyright notice

Fig. 1 — Detection of the SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines in autopsies requires devising sequence-specific regions for RT-qPCR assays within the spike gene structure. a The functional domains of the mRNA vaccine SARS-CoV-2 spike protein includes the assay targets for the BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine in the central helix (CH) domain (blue line below). For detection of the mRNA-1273 vaccine (green line), the assay detects a sequence within the heptad repeat 2 (HR2) segment (see Table 2). UTR untranslated region, SP signal peptide, NTD N-terminal domain, RBD receptor-binding domain, RBM receptor-binding motif, SD subdomain, FP fusion peptide, HR1 heptad repeat 1, CD connector domain, TM transmembrane, CT cytoplasmic tail. Also marked is the start codon (green line), stop codon (red line), S1/S2 cleavage site (black line), the vaccines’ two Proline substitutions (red P’s), and the polyA tail at the end. Sample amplification plots of RT-qPCR assays to detect b BNT162b2 and c mRNA-1273 SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in axillary lymph node autopsy samples. Double-stranded DNA templates (dsDNA) were used as positive controls. d All vaccine-positive samples were further screened for SARS-CoV-2 E gene. The viral gene was detected only in the two SARS-CoV-2 infected cardiac left ventricle samples (positive controls).