Korean researchers said they have developed a technology that detects airborne viruses on site.
On Thursday, the research team of Doctor Lee Joon-seok of Molecular Recognition Research Center at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) said it developed a diagnostic platform that monitors and identifies an airborne pathogen.
The research team of Professor Kim Min-gon at the Department of Chemistry at Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) and that of Professor Song Chang-seon at Avian Disease and Infectious Disease Laboratory of Konkuk University College of Veterinary Medicine also participated in the study.
Existing technologies allowed on-site monitoring of bacteria or fungi' concentration, but they had limitations in detecting a particular microorganism or a virus in a small size.
The new diagnostic platform allows a portable kit to capture and detect an airborne virus simultaneously easily. Like a pregnancy diagnostic kit, the disposable virus detection kit collects viruses for 10 to 30 minutes and yields the analysis outcome in about 20 minutes. The diagnostic kit can confirm the presence of a virus within 50 minutes on site.
The diagnostic platform collects floating viruses on a porous pad of glass fiber filters and concentrates and moves it to the detection zone using a capillary phenomenon. Then, the viruses are combined with infrared-emitting nanoparticles that react to particular viruses only so that the researchers can selectively detect the desired virus.
The platform allows the use of more than four diagnostic kits to detect several kinds of viruses at the same time.
The research team could collect the influenza virus spread in a large space and concentrate it over 1 million times on a porous pad. With the pretreatment of viruses attached to the pad surface and analysis solution optimization, the research team could retrieve and move 82 percent of the viruses to the detection zone.
“The platform can detect airborne biological hazards such as the Covid-19 virus by collecting and analyzing viruses on site. So, it can be used as an indoor air pollution monitoring system,” Lee of KIST said.
Sponsored by the Samsung Future Technology Incubation Program, the study is to be published as the cover paper of ACS Sensors, a peer-reviewed journal of sensor science.