A rapid and sensitive method to detect SARS-CoV-2 virus using targeted-mass spectrometry

Singh, P.; Chakraborty, R.; Marwal, R.; V S, R.; Bhaskar, A. K.; Vashisht, H.; Dhar, M. S.; Pradhan, S.; Ranjan, G.; Imran, M.; Raj, A.; Sharma, U.; Lall, H.; Dutta, M.; Garg, P.; Ray, A.; Dash, D.; Sivasubbu, S.; Gogia, H.; Madan, P.; Kabra, S.; Singh, S. K.; Agrawal, A.; Rakhit, P.; Kumar, P.; Sengupta, S.

In the last few months, there has been a global catastrophic outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome disease caused by the novel corona virus SARS-CoV-2 affecting millions of people worldwide. Early diagnosis and isolation is key to contain the rapid spread of the virus. Towards this goal, we report a simple, sensitive and rapid method to detect the virus using a targeted mass spectrometric approach, which can directly detect the presence of virus from naso-oropharyngeal swabs. Using a multiple reaction monitoring we can detect the presence of two peptides specific to SARS-CoV-2 in a 2.3 minute gradient run with 100% specificity and 90.4 % sensitivity when compared to RT-PCR. Importantly, we further show that these peptides could be detected even in the patients who have recovered from the symptoms and have tested negative for the virus by RT-PCR highlighting the sensitivity of the technique. This method has the translational potential of in terms of the rapid diagnostics of symptomatic and asymptomatic COVID-19 and can augment current methods available for diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2.