Recently, Ph.D. student Ruihua Tang from BEBC has published his first author research paper in Scientific Reports (IF=5.228) entitled " Improved Analytical Sensitivity of Lateral Flow Assay using Sponge for HBV Nucleic Acid Detection".

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection is a serious public health problem, which can be transmitted through various routes (e.g., blood donation) and cause hepatitis, liver cirrhosis and liver cancer. Hence, it is necessary to do diagnostic screening for high-risk HBV patients in these transmission routes. Nowadays, protein-based technologies have been used for HBV testing, which however involve the issues of large sample volume, antibody instability and poor specificity. Nucleic acid hybridization-based lateral flow assay (LFA) holds great potential to address these limitations due to its low-cost, rapid, and simple features, but the poor analytical sensitivity of LFA restricts its application. In this study, we developed a low-cost, simple and easy-to-use method to improve analytical sensitivity by integrating sponge shunt into LFA to decrease the fluid flow rate. The thickness, length and hydrophobicity of the sponge shunt were sequentially optimized, and achieved 10-fold signal enhancement in nucleic acid testing of HBV as compared to the unmodified LFA. The enhancement was further confirmed by using HBV clinical samples, where we achieved the detection limit of 10³ copies/ml as compared to 10⁴ copies/ml in unmodified LFA. The improved LFA holds great potential for diseases diagnostics, food safety control and environment monitoring at point-of-care.

The work is under the guidance of Feng Xu Professor. The co-authors of the paper include Yan Gong, Zhi Liu, XiuJun Li, Ting Wen, ZhiGuo Qu, Sufeng Zhang, Hui Yang, Qibing Mei, Feng Xu.

Links: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-01558-x?WT.feed_name=subjects_liver-diseases&error=cookies_not_supported