The cotton swab used for nucleic acid is not an ordinary cotton swab. Tang Rong, head of Mohe Medical Technology Co., Ltd., a manufacturer of antigen detection kits, said that strictly speaking, cotton swabs used for sampling should be called sampling swabs, not cotton swabs, because they are not cotton swabs used in daily life. The biggest difference between the two is that the cotton swabs used in daily life are made of absorbent cotton, while the sampling swab looks similar to an ordinary cotton swab, but the top is actually a flocked swab.
Features of flocked swabs
Flocked swabs are made of nylon fiber flocking technology. The front end is coated with nylon short fibers fixed vertically, making the entire collection swab There are no absorption holes in the collection area. In this way, the collected samples will not be dispersed and retained in the fiber, which is conducive to faster and more efficient elution. Relevant data shows that flocked swabs can elute more than 85% of the sample collected. Traditional cotton swabs, especially those made with absorbent cotton, do not completely collect and elute the sample.