The worldwide pandemic of COVID-19 has become a global public health crisis. Various clinical diagnosis methods have been developed to distinguish COVID-19–infected patients from healthy people. The nucleic acid test is the golden standard for virus detection as it is suitable for early diagnosis. However, due to the low amount of viral nucleic acid in the respiratory tract, the sensitivity of nucleic acid detection is unsatisfactory. As a result, serological screening began to be widely used with the merits of simple procedures, lower cost, and shorter detection time. Serological tests currently include the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), lateral flow immunoassay (LFIA), and chemiluminescence immunoassay (CLIA). This review describes various serological methods, discusses the performance and diagnostic effects of different methods, and points out the problems and the direction of optimization, to improve the efficiency of clinical diagnosis. These increasingly sophisticated and diverse serological diagnostic technologies will help human beings to control the spread of COVID-19.
The
spread of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is caused by
severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), resulting
in a global pandemic with around four million deaths. Although there
are a variety of nucleic acid-based tests for detecting SARS-CoV-2,
these methods have a relatively high cost and require expensive supporting
equipment. To overcome these limitations and improve the efficiency
of SARS-CoV-2 diagnosis, we developed a microfluidic platform that
collected serum by a pulling-force spinning top and paper-based microfluidic
enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) for quantitative IgA/IgM/IgG
measurements in an instrument-free way. We further validated the paper-based
microfluidic ELISA analysis of SARS-CoV-2 receptor-binding domain
(RBD)-specific IgA/IgM/IgG antibodies from human blood samples as
a good measurement with higher sensitivity compared with traditional
IgM/IgG detection (99.7% vs 95.6%) for early illness onset patients.
In conclusion, we provide an alternative solution for the diagnosis
of SARS-CoV-2 in a portable manner by this smart integration of pulling-force
spinning top and paper-based microfluidic immunoassay.
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