Development of a Microneedle Swab for Acquisition of Genomic DNA From Buccal Cells.

Yun-Seo Kim,Jung-Hwan Park,Gil-Hwan Sung,Woonsung Na,Hae-Jin Hu,Jeonghyeon Kim,Seung-Ki Baek,Gyeong Ryeong Kim,Yun Kyoung Kim

doi:10.3389/fbioe.2022.829648

Abstract

A swab is a tool for obtaining buccal DNA from buccal mucus for biological analysis. The acquisition of a sufficient amount and high quality of DNA is an important factor in determining the accuracy of a diagnosis. A microneedle swab (MN swab) was developed to obtain more oral mucosal tissues non-invasively. Eight types of MN swabs were prepared with varying combinations of patterns (zigzag or straight), number of MNs, intervals of MNs, and sharpness of tips. When MN swab was applied up to 10 times, the tissue amount and DNA yield increased compared to commercial swabs. A zigzag pattern of microneedles was found to be more efficient than a straight pattern and increasing the number of microneedles in an array increased the DNA yield. The MN swab collected about twice the DNA compared to the commercial swab. In an in vivo test using mini pigs, the lower cycle threshold values of mucosal samples collected with MN swabs compared to samples collected with commercial swabs indicated that a greater amount of DNA was collected for SNP genotyping. A polymer MN swab is easy to manufacture by a single molding process, and it has a greater sampling capacity than existing commercial swabs.

Highlights

For testing various diseases such as diabetes, hyperlipidemia, and infectious diseases, a blood collection method has been widely used because it provides high quality and large amounts of DNA (Grady et al, 2014; De Sousa et al, 2017; Blauwkamp et al, 2019)
Our results indicate that the atomic percentages of nitrogen on the tip(T), in the interval(I), and at the base(B) were 21.80, 24.29, and 24.17%, respectively
For Allele 2 of Group B, the mean cycle threshold (Ct) value was 27.5 for blood and 30.6 for the nylon flocked swab sample. These results show that the amount of DNA obtained by using the microneedle swab (MN swab) was higher than that obtained by using the nylon flocked swab

Summary

Introduction

For testing various diseases such as diabetes, hyperlipidemia, and infectious diseases, a blood collection method has been widely used because it provides high quality and large amounts of DNA (Grady et al, 2014; De Sousa et al, 2017; Blauwkamp et al, 2019). This method has several drawbacks, including pain caused by the syringe, need for medical expertise, high cost, and use of biohazardous material. The oral cavity is an ideal place to obtain biological samples such as microorganisms, viruses, protein, and DNA material (Frantz Burger et al, 2005; Schulz et al, 2013; Yu et al, 2017; Kam et al, 2020). It was announced that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is distributed in the oral mucosa, so the oral mucosa is a suitable source for detecting this virus (Kam et al, 2020)

Methods

Results

Conclusion