Development of Reverse Transcription Loop-mediated Isothermal Amplification (RT-LAMP) Assays Targeting SARS-CoV-2

Gun-Soo Park; Keunbon Ku; Seung-Hwa Beak; Seong Jun Kim; Seung Il Kim; Bum-Tae Kim; Jin-Soo Maeng

To overcome such cost-restriction of RT-qPCR and still detect pathogens' nucleic acids, isothermal amplification methods have been developed [10] . Among such methods, Loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) method has some advantages to be applied for point-of-care test (POCT) [11] . Well optimized LAMP assay shows sensitivity comparable to that of PCR, less than 10 copies per reaction [12] . Intercalating fluorescent dyes are compatible with LAMP reaction so that we can observe amplification in real-time [13] . Because amplification efficiency of LAMP reaction is very high, changes in reaction mixture components made it possible to detect the result with colorimetric detection methods [14] [15] [16] . Moreover, unpurified sample can be directly used for LAMP [17] [18] [19] . This indicates that high-throughput test is possible when use of unpurified specimen is combined with noninstrumental (e.g. colorimetric) detection.