Smartphone Screen Testing, a novel pre-diagnostic method to identify SARS-CoV-2 infectious individuals
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic will likely take years to control globally, and constant epidemic surveillance will be required to limit the spread of SARS-CoV-2, especially considering the emergence of new variants that could hamper the effect of vaccination efforts. We developed a simple and robust - Phone Screen Testing (PoST) - method to detect positive SARS-CoV-2 individuals by RT-PCR testing of smartphone screen swab samples. We show that 81.3-100% of individuals with high-viral load SARS-CoV-2 nasopharyngeal positive samples also test positive for PoST, suggesting this method is effective in identifying COVID-19 contagious individuals. Furthermore, we successfully identified polymorphisms associated with SARS-CoV-2 Alpha, Beta and Gamma variants, in SARS-CoV-2 positive PoST samples. Overall, we report that PoST is a new non-invasive, cost-effective, and easy to implement smartphone-based smart alternative for SARS-CoV-2 testing, which could help to contain COVID-19 outbreaks and identification of variants of concern in the years to come.
Data availability
All the data used generated by this study was provided in the uploaded manuscript and source files.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Moorfields Eye Charity (Career Development Award 001155)
- Rodrigo M Young
Moorfields Eye Charity (Springboard Award GR001210)
- Rodrigo M Young
Agencia Nacional de Investigacion y Desarrollo Chile (ANID-Covid0789)
- Luis A Quiñones
Agencia Nacional de Investigacion y Desarrollo Chile (ANID-Covid1038)
- Ana M Sandino
Agencia Nacional de Investigacion y Desarrollo Chile (ANID-Covid1038)
- Ana M Sandino
Fondecyt (1211841)
- Felipe Reyes-Lopez
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: Informed consent and consent to publish was obtained from all the individuals that participated in this study before performing the sampling process. This has been made explicit in the materials and methods section of the article. Ethical approval was obtained by the Ethics and Scientific Committee of Clinica Davila (Santiago, Chile) under the approval titled: "Identificación de marcadores de riesgo asociados a la severidad del Covid-19 en el microbioma respiratorio".
Copyright
© 2021, Young et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 7,473
- views
-
- 480
- downloads
-
- 9
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Further reading
-
Mobile phones could be used to test for COVID-19
-
- Microbiology and Infectious Disease
Decades of research have made clear that host-associated microbiomes touch all facets of health. However, effective therapies that target the microbiome have been elusive given its inherent complexity. Here, we experimentally examined diet-microbe-host interactions through a complex systems framework, centered on dietary oxalate. Using multiple, independent molecular, rodent, and in vitro experimental models, we found that microbiome composition influenced multiple oxalate-microbe-host interfaces. Importantly, the administration of the oxalate-degrading specialist, Oxalobacter formigenes, was only effective against a poor oxalate-degrading microbiota background and gives critical new insights into why clinical intervention trials with this species exhibit variable outcomes. Data suggest that, while heterogeneity in the microbiome impacts multiple diet-host-microbe interfaces, metabolic redundancy among diverse microorganisms in specific diet-microbe axes is a critical variable that may impact the efficacy of bacteriotherapies, which can help guide patient and probiotic selection criteria in probiotic clinical trials.