ABSTRACT
During the epidemics in the Qing dynasty, many medical professionals, nonprofessionals, and social organizations collected and sorted medical prescriptions related to infectious diseases. These people also compiled, published, disseminated, and consulted related medical formularies. The above historical event can be viewed as the construction and dissemination of medical knowledge. They edited and published medical formularies on infectious diseases with lower cost and in flexible ways by taking the initiative and giving full scope to creativity. Diverse anti-epidemic medical prescriptions from these medical formularies can be used for infectious diseases in the event of the outbreaks. However, the therapeutic effects of classical prescriptions and folk recipes cannot be regarded as the same. The wide circulation of anti-epidemic medical prescriptions and medical formularies was essentially a process of epidemic prevention resource allocation. Not only did it enable many nonprofessionals to participate in epidemic prevention and control, but it also enhanced awareness, knowledge, and capacity for epidemic prevention at the individual level. At the same time, due to the uneven quality and individual differences in the physical fitness and condition of the prescriptions and formularies, they had the capacity of causing inconveniences to the readers or patients.
ABSTRACT
RT-LAMP detection of SARS-CoV-2 has been demonstrated to be a valuable diagnostic method for the diagnosis of COVID-191,2, which can rapidly screen carriers of the virus to effectively control the spread of the SARS-CoV-2. Here, we present a combination of dyes for isothermal detection of SARS-CoV-2 as a commercial alternative, with expanded colorimetric spectrum. We compared them with commercial reagents and proved their suitability and sensitivity through clinical RNA samples. In addition, together with commercial single dye indicators, we believe the expanded color spectrum developed here as an indicator of rapid detection will promote the diagnosis of COVID-19.
ABSTRACT
RT-LAMP detection of SARS-CoV-2 has been shown to be a valuable approach to scale up COVID-19 diagnostics and thus contribute to limiting the spread of the disease. Here we present the optimization of highly cost-effective in-house produced enzymes, and we benchmark their performance against commercial alternatives. We explore the compatibility between multiple DNA polymerases with high strand-displacement activity and thermostable reverse transcriptases required for RT-LAMP. We optimize reaction conditions and demonstrate their applicability using both synthetic RNA and clinical patient samples. Finally, we validate the optimized RT-LAMP assay for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 in unextracted heat-inactivated nasopharyngeal samples from 184 patients. We anticipate that optimized and affordable reagents for RT-LAMP will facilitate the expansion of SARS-CoV-2 testing globally, especially in sites and settings where the need for large scale testing cannot be met by commercial alternatives.