On April 21, Clinical Chemistry published ilaco (isothermal lamp based method for covid-19), a detection method based on loop mediated isothermal amplification technology. This test method uses primer Explorer Six specific primers designed by V5 tool, together with DNA polymerase and reverse transcriptase with chain displacement activity, specifically, efficiently, rapidly and accurately amplified orf1ab gene fragment of covid-19 virus in a short time (according to the viral load in the sample, the reaction time varies from 10-35 minutes). The accumulation of protons produced by the polymerase during the reaction results in the decrease of pH value of the reaction solution. Therefore, by using the visualized pH indicator in the premixed solution, we can judge whether the result is positive by visually observing whether the reaction solution changes from pink to yellow (as shown in Fig. 1).
At present, the detection method of qPCR based on TaqMan has been developed and applied by many research centers and disease control centers around the world, and the sensitivity of ilaco is comparable to that of the detection method. The work was carried out by Professor Yin Xiushan, Applied Biology Laboratory of School of pharmacy and bioengineering of our university, Professor Chen Weihua, Huazhong University of science and technology, Professor Vicent pelechano, Karolinska Medical College, Sweden, and CDC of Liaoning Province and Shenyang City. Among them, Shenyang University of chemical technology is the first unit of the paper, Yu Lin from the applied biology laboratory, Wu Shanshan and Hao Xiaowen from Huazhong University of science and technology are the co first authors.
Now, Professor Yin Xiushan's team is cooperating with Professor Vicent pelechano's laboratory to optimize the detection method and strive to shorten the detection time to less than 3-9 minutes, so as to achieve faster and more accurate detection of new coronavirus.
This work is supported by key scientific research projects in Liaoning Province in 2020 and covid-19 emergency research project in Ganzhou.
