Plausible fast & economic detection of SARS-CoV infection using paper-based isoelectric focusing: a hypothesis

Abstract

In the wake of current pandemic of COVID-19, there has arisen an urgent need to come up with novel ways to detect the infected person with SARS-CoV-2 at an extremely fast pace so that the person is immediately quarantined to prevent further transmission of the virus to other susceptible individuals. Such quick detection measures would allow the timely mitigation of the dreadful disease which has claimed close to 100,000 lives worldwide. In this article, a very fast and cheap way to detect the presence of SARS-CoV in the biopsied tissue has been proposed. The current method discussed here would drastically reduce the time of detection of an infected person to less than ~ 6 hours in addition to the economic benefit of using paper-based isoelectric focusing. The infecting coronavirus that causes severe respiratory distress contains four major types of structural proteins: spike (S) proteins, membrane (M) proteins, envelope (E) proteins & nucleocapsid (N) proteins. Peculiar isoelectric points of these four structural proteins have been proposed to detect the SARS-CoV infection. This work would be of immense interest to the scientists, researchers as well as health professionals who are trying to mitigate the spread of the disease as well as to cure it at the same time.