Viral infections remain one of the biggest challenges for human health. Accurate and early detection of the infectious virus are crucial for clinical diagnosis, transmission control, and therapy. Recent progress in the development of aptasensors, using aptamers for selective molecular recognition, and application to viral-antigen detection is highly promising. As one of the leaders in disease in vitro diagnosis (IVD) research, Creative Biolabs makes the use of aptasensors for the detection of viral pathogens and believes in the feasibility of aptasensors to become standard devices for point-of-care diagnostics of viruses.
Current approaches to diagnose viral infections mainly include virus isolation in tissue cultures, immunological and molecular methods. Although antibody-based detection methods are widely used in preclinical research, their popularity is hindered by high cost, antibody instability, and the limitation of target types. Besides, these methods have some common limitations such as technically demanding, false positive, or false negative results. Aptamers are easy to synthesize, modify, and can bind to a broad range of targets. Aptamer-based assays for virus detection may improve these mentioned drawbacks to some extent. Therefore, aptamers are promising for detecting viruses and treating viral infections.
Fig.1 Comparison of different methods for the viruses detection. (van den Kieboom, 2015)
The ideal viral diagnostic method, should be fast, accurate, and easy to use, irrespective of the viruses or assay requirements. In viral diagnostics, the components targeted to detect the virus could be virion, nucleic acids, and viral protein. Virus-particle quantification is difficult, due to the lack of proper standards. The viral components are far more abundant than complete virions, so they are the preferred targets. The viral proteins seem to be better targets since nucleic acids are rapidly degraded in body fluid samples.
Fig.2 Virus anatomy. (van den Kieboom, 2015)
Aptamer-based biosensors (aptasensors), mainly classified into optical and electronic aptasensors, are widely used in virus detection. Both DNA or RNA aptamers showing affinity and specificity for the specific virus could be further assembled onto gold nanoparticles that subsequently formed a gold nanoshell (AuNS) around the viral envelope. These shells could be visualized by transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Changes in size and structure of the AuNS coated virus can be used to detect the viruses. Besides modifications for stabilization and immobilization, an extensive range of molecular labels can be attached to RNA and DNA aptamers, sometimes with linker oligonucleotides or spacer molecules in between to reduce interference with target recognition.
Fig.3 Schematic illustration of electrical aptasensors. (Zou, 2019)
Provided Detection Platforms
Featured Services
Please contact us for more information about virus-specific aptamers-related services or aptamer products.
References
For Research Use Only.
