A streamlined approach to rapidly detect SARS-CoV-2 infection, avoiding RNA extraction

Stefania Marzinotto; Catia Mio; Adriana Cifu'; Roberto Verardo; Corrado Pipan; Claudio Schneider; Francesco Curcio

As shown in Figure 1 , Panel A, both samples displayed the same amplification profile with minimal differences. To further validate our data, we employed a technique with higher sensitivity, the droplet digital PCR (ddPCR). Using samples from the automated extraction and from our method, we found the same viral copies (i.e. 13000 copies/5µL) in both, showing that our in-house pretreatment protocol is a reliable and rapid method to assess SARS-CoV-2 infection directly from nasopharyngeal swabs ( Fig. 1; Panel B) . Furthermore, since the automated diagnostic extraction system used in this study requires 200µL swab-derived material as template, while our method only needs 100µL of material, we were able to detect twice as much of the viral genome for each µL of sample.