Vue d'ensemble de la session |
Tuesday, July 19 |
10:15 |
Gold Nanoparticles for Mutationally Preserved Geno-sensing of SARS-CoV-2
* Dipanjan Pan, Professor in Diagnostic Radiology & Nuclear Medicine, Pediatrics and Chemical, Biochemical and Environmental Engineering and Computer Science and Elec, United States The global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) highlights the shortcomings of the current testing paradigm for viral disease diagnostics. Gold nanoparticles offer unique physico-chemical properties, such as plasmonic, conductive, and optoelectronic that makes them highly desirable for sensing applications. A unique set of antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) has been developed to interact with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) irrespective of its ongoing mutations. The ASOs target a specific segment of nucleocapsid phosphoprotein (N) gene of SARS-CoV-2 with high binding efficiency which do not mutate among any of the known variants including delta and omicron. The mechanism of interaction among the ASOs and SARS-CoV-2 RNA was then explored with a combination of surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) and machine learning techniques. Further probing into the interaction profile of the ASOs revealed that the ASO-RNA hybridization remained unaltered for single point mutations at the target RNA site and diminished only in case of the hypothetical double or triple point mutations. It was observed that the technique, described herein, could efficiently discriminate between clinically positive and negative samples with ~98% sensitivity and ~98% specificity of SARS-CoV-2 using various detection techniques such as plasmonic, electrochemical and hyperspectral. Our results indicated that the sensitivity of detection can reach from few copies/?L to a single virus. Thus, this study establishes N gene targeted ASOs and gold nanoparticles as the fundamental machinery to efficiently detect all the current SARS-CoV-2 variants regardless of its mutations using techniques ranging from point-of-care to laboratory-based applications. |