Nucleic Acid-Based Detection of COVID-19

Current coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic is caused by a novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), posing a major health problem worldwide. Therefore, rapid and accurate identification of COVID-19 is playing an important role in preventing subsequent secondary spread from controlling this epidemic. Different diagnostic tools and nucleic acid (NA)-based technologies for COVID-19 have been adopted. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is widely used for molecular diagnosis at prime level. However, it exhibits low sensitivity and falsepositive results in clinical applications. Therefore, loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) assay is considered a prominent NA amplification method for diagnosing COVID-19. Similarly, microarray and RNA-targeting clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) with advancements in instrumentation are recently adapted for rapid, high throughput, and portable sensing of COVID-19 NA detection. Besides, nanopore technology, rolling circle amplification-based method and silicon-based integrated point-of-need (PoN) transducer are also promising diagnostic tools for detecting COVID-19. This chapter will discuss the potential of all these latest technologies for COVID-19 diagnosis in detail.

Keywords: COVID-19, CRISPR, LAMP, Microarray, Nanopore Technology, Nucleic Acid-based Detection, PCR.