Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College London, London, SW7 2AZ, UK.
Department of Future Technologies, University of Turku, 20500, Turku, Finland.
Nat Commun. 2020 Dec 2;11(1):6176. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-19911-6.
Rapid screening and low-cost diagnosis play a crucial role in choosing the correct course of intervention when dealing with highly infectious pathogens. This is especially important if the disease-causing agent has no effective treatment, such as the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, and shows no or similar symptoms to other common infections. Here, we report a disposable silicon-based integrated Point-of-Need transducer (TriSilix) for real-time quantitative detection of pathogen-specific sequences of nucleic acids. TriSilix can be produced at wafer-scale in a standard laboratory (37 chips of 10 × 10 × 0.65 mm in size can be produced in 7 h, costing ~0.35 USD per device). We are able to quantitatively detect a 563 bp fragment of genomic DNA of Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis through real-time PCR with a limit-of-detection of 20 fg, equivalent to a single bacterium, at the 35 cycle. Using TriSilix, we also detect the cDNA from SARS-CoV-2 (1 pg) with high specificity against SARS-CoV (2003).
在处理高传染性病原体时，快速筛选和低成本诊断对于选择正确的干预措施至关重要。如果病原体没有有效的治疗方法，例如新型冠状病毒 SARS-CoV-2，并且与其他常见感染没有或相似的症状，那么这一点尤其重要。在这里，我们报告了一种用于实时定量检测病原体特异性核酸序列的一次性硅基集成即时检测传感器（TriSilix）。TriSilix 可以在标准实验室中以晶圆级规模生产（7 小时内可生产 37 个 10×10×0.65mm 大小的芯片，每个器件的成本约为 0.35 美元）。我们能够通过实时 PCR 定量检测分枝杆菌亚种副结核分枝杆菌的 563bp 基因组 DNA 片段，检测限为 20fg，相当于单个细菌，在 35 个循环时。使用 TriSilix，我们还可以检测到 SARS-CoV-2 的 cDNA，对 SARS-CoV（2003 年）具有很高的特异性。
