Laboratory diagnosis of emerging human coronavirus infections – the state of the art

Abstract

The three unprecedented outbreaks of emerging human coronavirus (HCoV) infections at the beginning of the twentyfirst century have highlighted the necessity for readily available, accurate and fast diagnostic testing methods. The laboratory diagnostic methods for human coronavirus infections have evolved substantially, with the development of novel assays as well as the availability of updated tests for emerging ones. Newer laboratory methods are fast, highly sensitive and specific, and are gradually replacing the conventional gold standards. This presentation reviews the current laboratory methods available for testing coronaviruses by focusing on the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak going on in Wuhan. Viral pneumonias typically do not result in the production of purulent sputum. Thus, a nasopharyngeal swab is usually the collection method used to obtain a specimen for testing. Nasopharyngeal specimens may miss some infections; a deeper specimen may need to be obtained by bronchoscopy. Alternatively, repeated testing can be used because over time, the likelihood of the SARS-CoV-2 being present in the nasopharynx increases. Several integrated, random-access, point-of-care molecular devices are currently under development for fast and accurate diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infections. These assays are simple, fast and safe and can be used in the local hospitals and clinics bearing the burden of identifying and treating patients.

eCovSens-Ultrasensitive Novel In-House Built Printed Circuit Board Based Electrochemical Device for Rapid Detection of nCovid-19 antigen, a spike protein domain 1 of SARS-CoV-2

“…With more than half the world under lock-down in order to contain the spread of this pandemic, with no immediate vaccine available, it has become the need of the hour to develop rapid detection methods to diagnose nCovid-19 in both symptomatic as well as asymptomatic patients (Mizumoto et al, 2020) that would enable early mitigation. For early diagnosis, chest computed tomography (CT) (Bai et al, 2020;Bernheim et al, 2020;Li and Xia, 2020;Pan et al, 2020a) was used whereas in the analytical stage, realtime reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) Corman et al, 2020;Lan et al, 2020;Loeffelholz and Tang, 2020) remains the standard test for the etiologic diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 (Ai et al, 2020;Fang et al, 2020). Recently, antibody and CRISPR based techniques are being introduced as supplemental tools for rapid diagnosis Ding et al, 2020;Yang et al, 2020).…”

Case Report: The Importance of Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) and Coinfection with Other Respiratory Pathogens in the Current Pandemic

“…1 The current main modality of testing is real-time reverse transcriptionpolymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). 2,3 The early shortage of available tests in the United States led many healthcare facilities to ration tests and adopt an algorithmic approach for testing. These algorithms included initial testing for common respiratory pathogens, and if negative, proceeding with novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) testing if there was a strong suspicion.…”

Optical techniques for fast screening – Towards prevention of the coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak

“…COVID-19 is the latest biological hazard to pose threat to healthcare, political, economic and social sectors worldwide. Countries whi ch are part of the developed or under development world could have benefitted from technologies able to perform high throughput COVID -19 sensing to prevent the virus outbreak [1,2].…”

“…Biomarkers are present in coronaviruses, as their constitution comprises a single strand of positive-sense RNA involved by structural proteins/glycoprotein and lipids of their nucleocapsid, matrix and envelope. In addition, the S protei n from coronavirus can bind to the host cellmembrane receptors to facilitate viral entry into cells including the human angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor [2]. These biomarkers can be targeted by molecular specific diagnostic tests such as vibrational spectroscopy.…”