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

Singh, Praveen; Chakraborty, Rahul; Marwal, Robin; Radhakrishan, V. S.; Bhaskar, Akash Kumar; Vashisht, Himanshu; Dhar, Mahesh S.; Pradhan, Shalini; Ranjan, Gyan; Imran, Mohamed; Raj, Anurag; Sharma, Uma; Singh, Priyanka; Lall, Hemlata; Dutta, Meena; Garg, Parth; Ray, Arjun; Dash, Debasis; Sivasubbu, Sridhar; Gogia, Hema; Madan, Preeti; Kabra, Sandhya; Singh, Sujeet K.; Agrawal, Anurag; Rakshit, Partha; Kumar, Pramod; Sengupta, Shantanu

In the last few months, there has been a global catastrophic outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome disease caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 affecting millions of people worldwide. Early diagnosis and isolation are 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 min gradient run with 100% specificity and 90.5% 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. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1007/s42485-020-00044-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.