SARS-CoV-2 detection and testing

This paper investigates the feasibility of performing RT-qPCR directly on unprocessed nasal swab samples in virus transport medium without RNA extraction, showing potential for faster and more efficient COVID-19 testing.

Adding 2 μL of unextracted swab transport medium directly to a SARS-CoV-2 qRT-PCR gave 98.0% sensitivity and 100% specificity against an extraction-based Panther Fusion assay.

This paper introduces a scalable method for virus testing using pooled samples and message passing algorithms to estimate patient illness with fewer pooled measurements than existing methods.

LAMP-Seq combines three-step isothermal RT-LAMP amplification with combinatorial barcoding to pool and sequence SARS-CoV-2 clinical samples en masse for scalable diagnostics.

The paper validates a 4M GITC/Triton X-100 lysis buffer for SARS-CoV-2 RNA extraction, showing comparable results to commercial reagents during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The paper demonstrates that direct lysis of respiratory samples can replace RNA extraction kits for RT-qPCR detection of 2019-nCoV, offering higher throughput, lower cost, faster turnaround, and potentially higher sensitivity and improved safety.

This study shows that one RT-qPCR kit can detect SARS-CoV-2 directly from nasopharyngeal swabs without RNA extraction, suggesting this approach could alleviate reagent shortages.

A 343-primer-pair multiplex PCR assay enables electrophoretic detection and full-genome sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 across 8 to half a million viral copies from 13 clinical specimens.

Reverse-transcription recombinase polymerase amplification (RT-RPA) plus LbCas12a collateral cleavage detected synthetic SARS-CoV-2 ORF1ab RNA down to 10 copies/µL by fluorescence, with similar lateral-flow strip sensitivity.

A machine-learning design pipeline produced CRISPR-Cas13 detection assays for 67 viral taxa; the best of 4 screened SARS-CoV-2 designs reached 10 copies/μl on synthetic RNA.

Carboxyl-polymer-coated magnetic beads bind lysate RNA in one step and go straight into RT-PCR, detecting 10 pseudovirus copies with a linear response from 10 to 10^5 copies.