Current coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic is caused by a novel
severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), posing a major health
problem worldwide. Therefore, rapid and accurate identification of COVID-19 is
playing an important role in preventing subsequent secondary spread from controlling
this epidemic. Different diagnostic tools and nucleic acid (NA)-based technologies for
COVID-19 have been adopted. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is widely used for
molecular diagnosis at prime level. However, it exhibits low sensitivity and falsepositive
results in clinical applications. Therefore, loop-mediated isothermal
amplification (LAMP) assay is considered a prominent NA amplification method for
diagnosing COVID-19. Similarly, microarray and RNA-targeting clustered regularly
interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) with advancements in instrumentation
are recently adapted for rapid, high throughput, and portable sensing of COVID-19 NA
detection. Besides, nanopore technology, rolling circle amplification-based method and
silicon-based integrated point-of-need (PoN) transducer are also promising diagnostic
tools for detecting COVID-19. This chapter will discuss the potential of all these latest
technologies for COVID-19 diagnosis in detail.
Keywords: COVID-19, CRISPR, LAMP, Microarray, Nanopore Technology,
Nucleic Acid-based Detection, PCR.
