A MICROFLUIDIC-BASED QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS SYSTEM FOR THE DETECTION OF MULTIPLE NUCLEIC ACID TARGETS

Abstract

Viral infections have become an increasingly important cause of human morbidity and mortality throughout the world. In order to ensure the health, safety and welfare of people, further advances in genetic diagnosis technology are crucial for detecting the virus in the early stages, reducing the risk of severe symptoms, and preventing the spread of the diseases. Therefore, we have been developing a microfluidic device for the multiplexed genetic diagnosis of viral infections based on the loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) method. In this study, with the aim of introducing a versatile sample-to-answer platform, we developed a quantitative analysis system for the detection of multiple nucleic acid targets. It involved a time-lapse imaging equipment to acquire images during the gene amplification process and a hue-based quantitative data analysis software to calculate the color change of the reaction microchambers. The experimental results on the diagnosis of human herpesviruses revealed that the developed system enables us to not only automatically generate gene amplification curves, but also assess the amount of target nucleic acid in the sample.