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Review
. 2020 Sep 1:163:112274.
doi: 10.1016/j.bios.2020.112274. Epub 2020 May 6.

The impact of biosensing in a pandemic outbreak: COVID-19

Eden Morales-Narváez  1 , Can Dincer  2
Affiliations
Review

The impact of biosensing in a pandemic outbreak: COVID-19

Eden Morales-Narváez et al. Biosens Bioelectron. .

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic outbreak is the most astounding scene ever experienced in the XXI century. In this opinionated review, we underscore the crucial role of biosensing to handle with such situations. As a matter of fact, testing accelerates life-saving decisions on treatment and isolation of COVID-19 patients in an early stage, and thereby, decelerating or even preventing the spread of such emerging infectious diseases. Meanwhile, it is also proven that a timely and broad application of testing leads to lower mortality rates in countries like Germany or South Korea. Besides, biosensors are also powerful tools for effective assessment of clinical progress and to provide alertness on severity or critical trends of infection. In view hereof, we critically discuss the state-of-the-art biosensing devices for COVID-19 testing. We spot the urgent needs and highlight innovative diagnostic approaches for targeting various COVID-19 related biomarkers. Finally, we outline our recommendations on biosensors and biosensing-related issues towards pandemic outbreaks.

Keywords: Biosensors; CRISPR; Emerging infectious diseases; Lateral flow assays; On-site testing; PCR; Serological tests.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Image 1
Graphical abstract
Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Schematic illustrating the structure of SARS-CoV-2 and related targeting sites (biomolecules) that can be used for the COVID-19 detection. Not to scale.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Possible detection strategies for CRISPR-powered COVID-19 testing ( Bruch et al., 2019b (Nature Biomedical Engineering)). In cleavage-based approach, after the recognition event of the target gene of SARS-CoV-2, the Cas/crRNA complex gets activated and cleaves the surrounding labelled reporter RNAs (reRNA), resulting in a concentration-dependent signal change. For the binding-based CRISPR detection, a catalytically deactivated Cas/crRNA complex, specific to the target sequence of COVID-19, is immobilized on the sensor surface (for example, on a graphene-based field effect transistor as previously applied for detecting genetic mutations (Hajian et al., 2019)). Upon recognition of its target, the resulting signal can be read out via a handheld device.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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