Recently,
Ph.D. student Ruihua Tang from BEBC has published his first author research
paper in Scientific
Reports (IF=5.228) entitled " Improved Analytical Sensitivity
of Lateral Flow Assay using Sponge for HBV Nucleic Acid Detection".
Hepatitis B virus (HBV)
infection is a serious public health problem, which can be transmitted through
various routes (e.g., blood donation)
and cause hepatitis, liver cirrhosis and liver cancer. Hence, it is necessary
to do diagnostic screening for high-risk HBV patients in these transmission
routes. Nowadays, protein-based technologies have been used for HBV testing,
which however involve the issues of large sample volume, antibody instability
and poor specificity. Nucleic acid hybridization-based lateral flow assay (LFA)
holds great potential to address these limitations due to its low-cost, rapid,
and simple features, but the poor analytical sensitivity of LFA restricts its
application. In this study, we developed a low-cost, simple and easy-to-use
method to improve analytical sensitivity by integrating sponge shunt into LFA
to decrease the fluid flow rate. The thickness, length and hydrophobicity of the
sponge shunt were sequentially optimized, and achieved 10-fold signal
enhancement in nucleic acid testing of HBV as compared to the unmodified LFA.
The enhancement was further confirmed by using HBV clinical samples, where we
achieved the detection limit of 103 copies/ml as compared to 104 copies/ml in unmodified LFA. The improved LFA holds great potential for
diseases diagnostics, food safety control and environment monitoring at
point-of-care.
The work is under the guidance
of Feng Xu Professor. The co-authors of the paper include Yan Gong, Zhi Liu, XiuJun Li, Ting
Wen, ZhiGuo Qu, Sufeng Zhang, Hui Yang, Qibing Mei, Feng Xu.
Links: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-01558-x?WT.feed_name=subjects_liver-diseases&error=cookies_not_supported