A team of researchers at the Indian Institute Of Technology in Delhi has developed a very cheap method to test this deadly disease Covid 19. The institute claimed the new testing method based on real time polymerase chain reaction, based method of diagnosis. It is approved by the Indian Council for Medical Research.
This come when Indian Council for Medical Research purchased a testing kit for China, and it had a big default in them. The current testing kit are “Probe-Based” while one which has been developed by institute in “Probe-Free” which reduces the cost of testing kit without any compromise on its accuracy.
IIT Delhi said The assay has been validated at ICMR with a sensitivity and specificity of 100%. This makes IIT (Delhi) the first academic institute to have obtained ICMR approval for a real time PCR based diagnostic assay.
This Probe free assay for Covid-19 will be used for specific affordable testing. It is easily scaled up because it does not require fluorescent probes. Now, the institute is targeting on large-scale deployment of the kit.
Recently, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi tweeted about this Probe free assay for Covid-19. They said “ICMR approves the probe-free Covid-19 detection assay developed at IIT Delhi @ICMRDELHI.
Check it out their tweet.
The researchers at Indian Institute of Technology Delhi used comparative sequence analyses to identify different regions or short stretches of Ribonucleic Acid in the Covid-19 and SARS COV-2 genome, Professor Vivekanandan Perumal, the lead member of the team said.
“These unique regions are not present in other human coronavirus providing an opportunity to specifically detect Covid-19.” Professor Vivekanandan Perumal said.
Ribonucleic Acid is the one of the major biological macromolecules essential for all known forms of life.
Professor Vivekanandan Perumal said “Primer sets, targeting unique regions in the spike protein of Covid-19, were designed and tested using real time polymerase chain reaction. The primers designed by the group specifically bind to regions conserved in over 200 fully sequenced Covid-19 genomes. The sensitivity of this in-house assay in comparable to that of commercially available kits.”
The researchers team includes PhD scholars Prashant Pradhan, Ashutosh Pandey and Praveen Tripathi, post-doctoral fellows Dr Parul Gupta and Dr Akhilesh Mishra and professors Vivekanandan Perumal, Manoj B Menon, James Gomes and Bishwajit Kundu.
Coronavirus cases in India crosses 24,506, of which 5,063 are recovered and 775 are death. Most affected state Maharashtra has 6,430 cases, of which 283 are death.
