What if a COVID test was as easy as one, two, three? A team of researchers led by Jim Collins, a biomedical engineer at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, have created a test that detects SARS-CoV-2 infection from spit in three easy steps.
The steps are simple: spit into a filter, move a tube, and push a plunger down. Within an hour, the results glow bright enough to see with the naked eye or a smartphone app.
The point-of-care diagnostic platform, dubbed miSHERLOCK for “minimally instrumented specific high sensitivity enzymatic reporter unlocking,” uses CRISPR technology to cut out specific sections of the viral genome and single-stranded DNA probes that fluoresce. The low-cost technology can distinguish between variants and can be easily reconfigured to detect other viruses or variants of concern, the team reported in Science Advances.
“This is a really compelling and powerful application of the field of ...
