(Press-News.org) As the numbers of those infected with COVID-19 has continued to climb, the desperate need for a vaccine was apparent. Even now with the invention and administration of several COVID-19 vaccinations, the question remains: How effective are these vaccines? HMNTL students Congnyu Che, Weijing Wang, and Nantao Li, also members of the ECE Nanosensors Group, along with Postdoctoral Researcher Bin Zhao and Professor Brian Cunningham have recently been published in Talanta journal for the development of a cost efficient COVID-19 antibody test.
"Compared with other detection methods, our method is a simple, 15-minute sample-to-answer test," says Zhao, a postdoctoral research associate and IGB Fellow. "It costs less than $2 per test and is used with a desktop detection system that is suitable for point-of-care situations like clinics and physician offices."
When COVID-19 began developing into a global crisis in early 2020, this research group was already working on an NIH-funded project to develop a "flu chip" that would rapidly determine the most likely cause of a fever by measuring several proteins within a droplet of blood. They decided to pivot their efforts to detect COVID-19 antibodies instead.
"We made an important breakthrough at the end of May and our method started working," says Congnyu Che, a BioE and Holonyak Lab graduate student. "After that, it took only a couple of months for us to complete all the experiments that measured detection limits, selectivity against other proteins, and the minimum time needed to get a result."
Serological (detected by blood sample) antibody testing is an important diagnostic tool for combating the COVID-19 pandemic. Studies have shown that measurement of SARS-CoV-2 specific antibodies may be helpful for the diagnosis of suspected patients with negative RT-PCR results and for the identification of asymptomatic infections - a cause for concern as vaccinations may lessen or eliminate symptoms as well as prevent infection. Quantitative measurement of COVID-19 antibody titer is also vital for blood transfusion therapy, which has shown promising results for treating patients with severe symptoms.
"Quantitative assessment of COVID-19 antibody titer is especially important as clinicians and researchers more fully understand the patient-to-patient variability of immune response, in terms of the onset time for post-infection antibody production, and the post-recovery time that antibodies continue to be present," says Weijing Wang, a BioE and Holonyak Lab graduate student. "As vaccines become available, it will be urgent for patients to know the extent to which their immune response has been stimulated."
This highly sensitive, fast, and low-cost test demonstrates great potential for wide applications in diverse working environments. COVID antibody testing could become routine and simple as a variety of vaccines are deployed whose long-term protection is not yet fully known. The test is simple enough to be performed at schools, health clinics, pharmacies, and parts of the world where diagnostic laboratories are not available.
"Our developed method is not only rapid and simple, but also highly sensitive and quantitative. It also requires only a fingerstick quantity of blood (~ 4 μL)," says Nantao Li, an ECE and Holonyak Lab graduate student. "The method that we used to detect COVID-19 antibody can also be adapted to detect other molecules, such as antibodies to other viral pathogens, biomarkers for cardiac disease, and biomarkers for cancer."
Members of the research group say that, as researchers in the field of disease diagnostics, their mission is to develop innovative analytical methods and tools to provide potentially effective solutions for global public health. They are eager to contribute their expertise to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
"We are very glad we did it," says Zhao. "Without any one of us, this group couldn't have finished the work so quickly and efficiently. We all put forward many great ideas and were all very active during the experimental process."
The team says they also want to encourage everyone to continue social distancing and mask wearing even as vaccines are distributed.
INFORMATION:
People who are unable to make their rent or mortgage payments sleep less than than their peers who don't have such problems, and those who are forced to move because of financial problems sleep even less, according to a new RAND Corporation study.
The study, which followed 1,046 people receiving welfare in California over several years, is the first to analyze the relationship between housing insecurity and sleep outcomes after controlling for sleep duration and sleep quality measured prior to experiences with housing insecurity.
The study found that people who were unable to make a rent or mortgage payment slept on average 22 fewer minutes a night than their peers who were able to make their rent or mortgage payments.
People who were ...
Richard Feynman, one of the most respected physicists of the twentieth century, said "What I cannot create, I do not understand". Not surprisingly, many physicists and mathematicians have observed fundamental biological processes with the aim of precisely identifying the minimum ingredients that could generate them. One such example are the patterns of nature observed by Alan Turing. The brilliant English mathematician demonstrated in 1952 that it was possible to explain how a completely homogeneous tissue could be used to create a complex embryo, and he did so using one of the simplest, most elegant mathematical models ever written. One of the results of such models is that the symmetry shown by a cell or a tissue can "break" under a set of conditions. However, ...
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Already in the 1920s, in an attempt to unify the forces of gravity and electromagnetism, Theodor Kaluza and Oskar Klein speculated ...
PHILADELPHIA--Scientists in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have uncovered the molecular causes of a congenital form of dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), an often-fatal heart disorder.
This inherited form of DCM -- which affects at least several thousand people in the United States at any one time and often causes sudden death or progressive heart failure -- is one of multiple congenital disorders known to be caused by inherited mutations in a gene called LMNA. The LMNA gene is active in most cell types, and researchers have ...
What The Study Did: Researchers used near real-time social media data to capture the public's changing COVID-19-related attitudes when former President Trump was infected.
Authors: Sean D. Young, Ph.D., of the University of California, Irvine, is the corresponding author.
To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/
(doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.0101)
Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional ...
What The Study Did: Researchers looked at changes in the rate of deaths associated with the use of illicit (such as cocaine) and medical stimulants in the United States from 2010 to 2017.
Authors: Joshua C. Black, Ph.D., of Rocky Mountain Poison & Drug Safety in Denver, is the corresponding author.
To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/
(doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2020.7850)
Editor's Note: The article includes conflicts of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial ...
What The Study Did: This report summarizes frequency and patterns of concussions and repetitive head impacts over the course of several seasons among college football players who wore sensors in their helmets.
Authors: Michael McCrea, Ph.D., of the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, is the corresponding author.
To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/
(doi:10.1001/jamaneurol.2020.5193)
Editor's Note: The article includes conflicts of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest ...
For the first time, scientists have calculated the global impact of human activity on animal movement, revealing widespread impacts that threaten species survival and biodiversity.
While it has been shown that activities such as logging and urbanisation can have big impacts on wildlife, the study by scientists at the University of Sydney and Deakin University in Australia shows that episodic events such as hunting, military activity and recreation can trigger even bigger changes in animal behaviour.
"It is vital we understand the scale of impact that humans have on other animal species," said lead author Dr Tim Doherty, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Sydney. "The consequences of changed animal movement can be profound and lead to reduced ...
When two sheets of graphene are stacked atop each other at just the right angle, the layered structure morphs into an unconventional superconductor, allowing electric currents to pass through without resistance or wasted energy.
This "magic-angle" transformation in bilayer graphene was observed for the first time in 2018 in the group of Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at MIT. Since then, scientists have searched for other materials that can be similarly twisted into superconductivity, in the emerging field of "twistronics." For the most part, no other twisted material has exhibited superconductivity other than the original twisted bilayer ...
An intelligent material that learns by physically changing itself, similar to how the human brain works, could be the foundation of a completely new generation of computers. Radboud physicists working toward this so-called "quantum brain" have made an important step. They have demonstrated that they can pattern and interconnect a network of single atoms, and mimic the autonomous behaviour of neurons and synapses in a brain. They report their discovery in Nature Nanotechnology on 1 February.
Considering the growing global demand for computing capacity, more and more data centres are necessary, all of which leave an ever-expanding energy footprint. 'It is clear that ...
