Oil immersed lossless total analysis system for integrated RNA extraction and detection of SARS-CoV-2

• Published in: Nature communications Vol. 12; no. 1; pp. 4317 - 9
• Main Authors: Juang, Duane S., Juang, Terry D., Dudley, Dawn M., Newman, Christina M., Accola, Molly A., Rehrauer, William M., Friedrich, Thomas C., O’Connor, David H., Beebe, David J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 14.07.2021; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 45/71; 49/62; 49/90; 631/1647/277; 631/326/2521; 639/166/985; Coronaviruses; COVID-19; Humanities and Social Sciences; Infectious diseases; Infrastructure; Instrumentation; multidisciplinary; Nucleic acids; Oil; Pandemics; Reagents; Ribonucleic acid; RNA; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2; Shortages; Supply chains; Viral diseases
• ISSN: 2041-1723; 2041-1723
• DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-24463-4

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed difficulties in scaling current quantitative PCR (qPCR)-based diagnostic methodologies for large-scale infectious disease testing. Bottlenecks include lengthy multi-step processes for nucleic acid extraction followed by qPCR readouts, which require costly instrumentation and infrastructure, as well as reagent and plastic consumable shortages stemming from supply chain constraints. Here we report an Oil Immersed Lossless Total Analysis System (OIL-TAS), which integrates RNA extraction and detection onto a single device that is simple, rapid, cost effective, and requires minimal supplies and infrastructure to perform. We validated the performance of OIL-TAS using contrived SARS-CoV-2 viral particle samples and clinical nasopharyngeal swab samples. OIL-TAS showed a 93% positive predictive agreement (n = 57) and 100% negative predictive agreement (n = 10) with clinical SARS-CoV-2 qPCR assays in testing clinical samples, highlighting its potential to be a faster, cheaper, and easier-to-deploy alternative for infectious disease testing. Bottlenecks in qPCR-based COVID-19 diagnostics include the lengthy multistep process and reagent shortages. Here the authors report OIL-TAS which integrates RNA extraction and detection into a single device.