REVIEW ARTICLE
Current and Emerging Technologies for the Diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2
Davoud Afshar1, 2, Solmaz Ohadian Moghadam3, Siamak Heidarzadeh1, Fatemeh Fardsanei4, Maniya Arshadi5, Reza Ranjbar6, *
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2021Volume: 15
First Page: 77
Last Page: 86
Publisher ID: TOMICROJ-15-77
DOI: 10.2174/1874285802115010077
Article History:
Received Date: 22/12/2020Revision Received Date: 25/2/2021
Acceptance Date: 22/4/2021
Electronic publication date: 16/09/2021
Collection year: 2021
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Currently, there are numerous under development or developed assays with various sensitivities and specificities for diagnosis of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The World Health Organization (WHO) has approved several detection protocols based on real-time reverse transcription PCR (RT-qPCR) and the reliability of tests to detect the N, S, or RdRp/Hel genes of the SARS-Cov-2 virus has also investigated. Among these targets, COVID-19-RdRp/Hel targets represented the highest sensitivity. Reverse transcription loop-mediated isothermal amplification (RT-LAMP) has also been developed to rapidly and efficiently amplify RNA under isothermal conditions. Other isothermal amplification approaches such as nucleic acid sequence-based amplification (NASBA), recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA), and rolling circle amplification (RCA) have also been reported for detecting coronaviruses but like LAMP assay. Different serological tests, including neutralization tests, immunofluorescent (IFA), enzyme-linked immunosorbent (ELISA), and western blotting assays, are available. Point-of-care tests (POCT) are emerging to detect the virus genome, IgG, or IgM antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. The advent of more sensitive, cheaper, and easier-to-perform diagnostic tests seems to be a fundamental prerequisite to improve the diagnosis of COVID-19 infection. Herein, we reviewed several commercially available diagnostic methods used in many clinical laboratories to detect COVID-19.