The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a global crisis with
devastating
effects on public healthcare and the economy. Sensitive detection
of SARS-CoV-2 is the key to diagnose and control its spread. The spike
(S) protein is an abundant viral transmembrane protein and a suitable
target protein for the selective recognition of SARS-CoV-2. Here,
we report that with bovine serum albumin prescreening, a specific
phage peptide targeting SARS-CoV-2 S1 protein was biopanned with the
pIII phage display library. The identified phage #2 expressing the
peptide (amino acid sequence: NFWISPKLAFAL) shows high affinity to
the target with a dissociation constant of 3.45 ± 0.58 nM. Furthermore,
the identified peptide shows good specificity with a binding site
at the N-terminal domain of the S1 subunit through a hydrogen bond
network and hydrophobic interaction, supported by molecular docking.
Then, a sandwiched phage-based enzyme-linked chemiluminescence immunoassay
(ELCLIA) was established by using phage #2 as a bifunctional probe
capable of SARS-CoV-2 S1 antigen recognition and signal amplification.
After optimizing the conditions, the proposed phage ELCLIA exhibited
good sensitivity, and as low as 78 pg/mL SARS-CoV-2 S1 could be detected.
This method can be applied to detect as low as 60 transducing units
(TU)/mL SARS-CoV-2 pseudovirus in 50% saliva. Therefore, specific
phage peptides have good prospects as powerful biological recognition
probes for immunoassay detection and biomedical applications.
The disastrous spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) induced serious public healthcare issues and significantly weakened the global economy. Although infecting SARS-CoV-2 will not be as fatal...
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