Abstract
Rapid diagnostics of infectious diseases and accurate identification of their causative pathogens play a crucial role in disease prevention, monitoring, and treatment. Conventional molecular detection of infectious pathogens requires expensive equipment and well-trained personnel, thus limiting its use in centralized clinical laboratories. To address this challenge, a portable smartphone-based quantitative molecular detection platform, termed “smart connected pathogen tracer” (SCPT), has been developed for pathogen monitoring and disease surveillance. The platform takes advantage of synergistically enhanced colorimetric loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) assay and smartphone-based color analysis, enabling simple, rapid and reliable nucleic acid quantification without need for expensive fluorescence detection equipment. The SCPT platform has been successfully applied to quantitatively detect: i) HPV DNA in saliva and clinical vaginal swab samples, and ii) HIV RNA in plasma samples with comparable sensitivity to state-of-art machine. It has also been demonstrated for disease spatiotemporal mapping and pathogen tracking by wireless connection and web-based surveillance. Such simple, cost-affordable, portable molecular detection platform has great potential for on-site early disease detection, remote healthcare monitoring, and epidemic surveillance.
Highlights
Rapid advances in mobile communication and consumer electronics have revolutionized our lives
When blue Eriochrome black T (EBT) indicator was added to the loop mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) reaction solution, it reacted with Mg2+ ions in LAMP reaction solution and formed red EBT-Mg2+ complex
Our experiments indicated that www.nature.com/scientificreports real-time hue-based LAMP assay on our SCPT platform could quantitatively detect less than 100 copies HPV 16 DNA, which is comparable to that of real-time fluorescence LAMP assay (Figure S5) using the state-of-art PCR machine
Summary
Rapid advances in mobile communication and consumer electronics have revolutionized our lives. To eliminate the need for expensive fluorescence optical components (e.g., optical filters, excitation light source), a synergistically enhanced colorimetric LAMP assay has been developed for multiple pathogen detection by using smartphone[20]. All of these approaches can only provide qualitative (yes/no) test results. The platform takes advantage of a colorimetric LAMP assay and smartphone-based real-time color analysis, enabling highly sensitive, cost-effective, quantitative molecular detection at the point of care. Unlike conventional real-time fluorescence detection[15,16], our platform monitors the color change of colorimetric LAMP assay in real-time, analyzes hue values, and quantifies target nucleic acid directly by an unmodified smartphone. Quantitative test results can be reported by the smartphone and wirelessly transmitted to a website, together with the testing time and GPS coordinates, allowing real-time pathogen tracking and disease mapping
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