Early and effective detection of pathogenic viruses in bodily fluids is vital in stopping the spread of infectious diseases . However, most laboratory-based methods for sample processing and nucleic acid detection have limited feasibility in low-resource settings and self-testing scenarios. A study published in the Analyst has reported using a smartphone clip-on instrument with an integrated system for rapid sample-to-answer detection of the Zika virus in a droplet of whole blood (Figure 1). A battery-powered handheld detection instrument uniformly heats the compartments from below, and an array of LEDs illuminates from above.
Simultaneously, fluorescent reporters are generated in the microfluidic compartments. These are kinetically monitored by sequential smartphone images. This device employs “spatial lamp ( S-LAMP )” image analysis that accelerates the reverse-transcriptase…
