A rapid and sensitive method to detect SARS-CoV-2 virus using targeted-mass spectrometry

Abstract

In the last few months, there has been a global catastrophic outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome disease caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 affecting millions of people worldwide. Early diagnosis and isolation are key to contain the rapid spread of the virus. Towards this goal, we report a simple, sensitive and rapid method to detect the virus using a targeted mass spectrometric approach, which can directly detect the presence of virus from naso-oropharyngeal swabs. Using a multiple reaction monitoring we can detect the presence of two peptides specific to SARS-CoV-2 in a 2.3 min gradient run with 100% specificity and 90.5% sensitivity when compared to RT-PCR. Importantly, we further show that these peptides could be detected even in the patients who have recovered from the symptoms and have tested negative for the virus by RT-PCR highlighting the sensitivity of the technique. This method has the translational potential of in terms of the rapid diagnostics of symptomatic and asymptomatic COVID-19 and can augment current methods available for diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2.

Keywords: COVID-19; LC-MS/MS; MRM; Naso-oropharyngeal swab; Proteomics; SARS-CoV-2.

Fig. 1

a Chromatographic separation of the three peptides of naso-oropharyngeal protein digest. Chromatogram for the selected fragment ions are shown in di_erent colours for tryptic digest peptides b (i) AIVSTIQRKYK (Replicase polyprotein 1 ab), (ii) QIAPGQTGK (Spike glycoprotein) and (iii) AEFAEVSK (Albumin)