No abstract

With the rapid spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), there is an urgent need for more rapid and simple detection technologies at the forefront of medical care worldwide.In this study, we evaluated the effectiveness of the Loopamp® 2019-SARSCoV-2 Detection Reagent Kit, which uses loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) technology. In this protocol, cDNA is synthesized from SARS-CoV-2 RNA using reverse transcriptase, followed by DNA amplification under isothermal conditions in one step. The RT-LAMP test kit amplified the targeted RNA of a SARS-CoV-2 isolate with a detection limit of 1.0 × 101 copies/μL, which was comparable to the detection sensitivity of quantitative reverse transcription PCR (RT-qPCR).Comparison with the results of RT-qPCR for 76 nasopharyngeal swab samples from patients with suspected COVID-19 showed a sensitivity of 100 % and a specificity of 97.6 %. In the 24 RNA specimens derived from febrile Japanese patients with or without influenza A, no amplification was observed using RT-LAMP. RT-LAMP could be a simple and easy-to-use diagnostic tool for the detection of SARS-CoV-2.

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Structural and biophysical studies reveal the induced-fit mechanism underlying the stringent specificity of invariant natural killer T cells for unique glycolipid antigens from the pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae.