Principal Investigator: Prof. Magnus Rueping
Poster Presenter: Yuli Peng
Lab:
Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that can cause respiratory diseases. Three coronaviruses have caused more serious and fatal disease in people: SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV), MERS coronavirus (MERS-CoV), and SARS-CoV-2. Point-of-care assays allow rapid diagnostic assessment of infectious patients. Such assays are ideally easy-to-use, low-cost, portable tests that do not require experienced staff or complex equipment. Among rapid tests, gold nanoparticle-based lateral flow immunoassays (LFAs) fulfill those requirements. Nanobodies, which are small variable domains of camelid heavy-chain only antibodies, have high affinity and specificity, easy to produce in large amounts in microbial systems, and the simple structure make them less prone to cross-reactivity. Here, we present the development of a low-cost, easy to produce nanobody-based LFAs for the rapid detection of SARS-CoV-2 and MERS-CoV. Furthermore, distinction between SARS-CoV-2 and MERS-CoV was achieved.