IIT researchers develop affordable Covid-19 test method: How does it work?

Team Udayavani, Apr 24, 2020, 3:25 PM IST

Researchers at IIT Delhi Kusuma School of Biological Sciences (KSBS) have developed a testing kit for covid-19 which will significantly reduce the cost of testing in India. The new testing technique developed by a team of researchers from IIT Delhi was approved by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR)

How does it work?

The testing method developed by IIT Delhi Researchers is probe free, unlike the usual test kits for Coronavirus which are based on probe-based testing protocol, it will in turn reduce the testing cost. It is based on PCR-based diagnostic assay, which will significantly bring down the test cost without compromising on the accuracy of the test results.

Professor Vivekanandan Perumal, lead member of the team 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 researchers at IIT-Delhi used comparative sequence analyses to identify unique regions, or short stretches of Ribonucleic Acid in the Covid-19 and SARS COV-2 genome. RNA or Ribonucleic Acid is one of the major biological macromolecules essential for all known forms of life.