Diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection with LamPORE, a high-throughput platform combining loop-mediated isothermal amplification and nanopore sequencing.
Peto L., Rodger G., Carter DP., Osman KL., Yavuz M., Johnson K., Raza M., Parker MD., Wyles MD., Andersson M., Justice A., Vaughan A., Hoosdally S., Stoesser N., Matthews PC., Eyre DW., Peto TEA., Carroll MW., de Silva TI., Crook DW., Evans CM., Pullan ST.
Background LamPORE is a novel diagnostic platform for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA combining loop-mediated isothermal amplification with nanopore sequencing, which could potentially be used to analyse thousands of samples per day on a single instrument.Methods We evaluated the performance of LamPORE against RT-PCR using RNA extracted from spiked respiratory samples and stored nose and throat swabs collected at two UK hospitals.Findings The limit of detection of LamPORE was ten genome copies/μl of extracted RNA, which is above the limit achievable by RT-PCR but was not associated with a significant reduction of sensitivity in clinical samples. Positive clinical specimens came mostly from patients with acute symptomatic infection, and among these LamPORE had a diagnostic sensitivity of 99.1% (226/228 [95% CI 96.9-99.9%]). Among negative clinical specimens, including 153 with other respiratory pathogens detected, LamPORE had a diagnostic specificity of 99.6% (278/279 [98.0-100.0%]). Overall, 1.4% (7/514 [0.5-2.9%]) of samples produced an indeterminate result on first testing, and repeat LamPORE testing on the same RNA extract had a reproducibility of 96.8% (478/494 [94.8-98.1%]).Interpretation LamPORE has a similar performance to RT-PCR for the diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection in symptomatic patients, and offers a promising approach to high-throughput testing.