A Concise Discussion on the Potential Spectral Tools for the Rapid COVID-19 Diagnosis

Mohanty, Abhijeet; Fatrekar, Adarsh P.; Krishnan, Saravanan; Vernekar, Amit A.

Developing robust methods to detect the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), a causative agent for the current global health pandemic, is an exciting area of research. Nevertheless, the currently used conventional reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) technique in COVID-19 diagnosis endures with some inevitable limitations. Consequently, the establishment of rapid diagnostic tools and quick isolation of infected patients is highly essential. Furthermore, the requirement of point-of-care testing is the need of the hour. Considering this, we have provided a brief review of the use of very recently reported robust spectral tools for rapid COVID-19 diagnosis. The spectral tools include, colorimetric reverse transcription loop-mediated isothermal amplification (RT-LAMP) and matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (MALDI-MS), with the admittance of principal component analysis (PCA) and machine learning (ML) for meeting the high-throughput and fool-proof diagnostic platforms for the detection of SARS-CoV-2, are reviewed. Recently, these techniques have been readily applied to screen a large number of suspected patients within a short period and they demonstrated higher sensitivity for the detection of COVID-19 patients from unaffected human subjects.