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. 2020 Aug 20;5(1):bpaa017.
doi: 10.1093/biomethods/bpaa017. eCollection 2020.

Easing diagnosis and pushing the detection limits of SARS-CoV-2

Uday Kiran  1   2 , C G Gokulan  1 , Santosh Kumar Kuncha  1   2 , Dhiviya Vedagiri  1   2 , Bingi Thrilok Chander  3 , Aedula Vinaya Sekhar  3 , Suchitra Dontamala  3 , Arakatla Lohith Reddy  3 , Karthik Bharadwaj Tallapaka  1 , Rakesh K Mishra  1 , Krishnan Harinivas Harshan  1
Affiliations
Free PMC article

Easing diagnosis and pushing the detection limits of SARS-CoV-2

Uday Kiran et al. Biol Methods Protoc. .
Free PMC article

Abstract

Rigorous testing is the way forward to fight the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. Here we show that the currently used and most reliable reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction-based severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) procedure can be further simplified to make it faster, safer, and economical by eliminating the RNA isolation step. The modified method is not only fast and convenient but also at par with the traditional method in terms of accuracy, and therefore can be used for mass screening. Our method takes about half the time and is cheaper by ∼40% compared to the currently used method. We also provide a variant of the new method that increases the efficiency of detection by ∼30% compared to the existing procedure. Taken together, we demonstrate a more effective and reliable method of SARS-CoV-2 detection.

Keywords: COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2 diagnosis; cost-effective; direct RT-PCR; dry swab; false-negative.

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