RE: 5 min covid test in US10 Oct 2020 22:06
That's a diff test design to ours - re read the report!
irst RT-PCR, then rapid test, then Feluda test and now, here's another one that detects novel coronavirus infection in just 5 minutes!
As scientists are racing against time to find a Covid vaccine, another fight is on to find a test the detects the coronavirus infection at the earliest to ensure a speedy detection and recovery.
A study published in journal Science says that researchers have found a test that detects the coronavirus in mere 5 minutes.
It says that the researchers used the CRISPR gene-editing technology to come up with the test.
But, will it be good enough?
"It looks like they have a really rock-solid test...It's really quite elegant," the study quoted Max Wilson, a molecular biologist at the University of California (UC), Santa Barbara, as saying.
"The new test is the fastest CRISPR-based diagnostic yet," the report said.
However, Melanie Ott, a virologist at UC San Francisco, said: "That's still not as good as the conventional coronavirus diagnostic setup, which uses expensive lab-based machines to track the virus down to one virus per microliter."
But, the study also quoted her saying: "The new setup was able to accurately identify a batch of five positive clinical samples with perfect accuracy in just 5 minutes per test, whereas the standard test can take 1 day or more to return results."
"The testing doesn't require "expensive lab equipment to run and could potentially be deployed at doctor's offices, schools, and office buildings," the journal read.
HOW CRISPR TESTS WORKS
According to the study, the CRISPR test works by identifying a sequence of RNA (Ribonucleic acid) -- about 20 RNA bases long -- which is unique to SARS-CoV-2.
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"They do so by creating a "guide" RNA that is complementary to the target RNA sequence and, thus, will bind to it in solution."
When the guide binds to its target, CRISPR tool's Cas13, used for RNA manipulation, "scissors" enzyme turns on and cuts apart any nearby single-stranded RNA.
"These cuts release a separately introduced fluorescent particle in the test solution. When the sample is then hit with a burst of laser light, the released fluorescent particles light up, signalling the presence of the virus," it said.
Researchers also said that the strength of "the fluorescent signal was proportional to the amount of virus in their sample".
This means that the test not only revealed if a sample was positive but also showed how much virus is present within a patient.
CRISPR, THE GENOME OR GENE EDITING TECHNOLOGY
Genome editing (also called gene editing) is a group of technologies that give scientists the ability to change an organism's DNA or RNA. These technologies allow genetic material to be added, removed, or altered at particular locations in the genome.
Several approaches to genome editing have been developed.
CRISPR-Cas13 is an RNA editing technique that can alter prote
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