8 research outputs found
MethPat: a tool for the analysis and visualisation of complex methylation patterns obtained by massively parallel sequencing
Development of a Loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) technique for specific and early detection of Mycobacterium leprae in clinical samples
Sensitive detection of miRNA by using hybridization chain reaction coupled with positively charged gold nanoparticles
An electrochemical clamp assay for direct, rapid analysis of circulating nucleic acids in serum
The analysis of cell-free nucleic acids (cfNAs), which are present at significant levels in the blood of cancer patients, can reveal the mutational spectrum of a tumour without the need for invasive sampling of the tissue. However, this requires differentiation between the nucleic acids that originate from healthy cells and the mutated sequences shed by tumour cells. Here we report an electrochemical clamp assay that directly detects mutated sequences in patient serum. This is the first successful detection of cfNAs without the need for enzymatic amplification, a step that normally requires extensive sample processing and is prone to interference. The new chip-based assay reads out the presence of mutations within 15 minutes using a collection of oligonucleotides that sequester closely related sequences in solution, and thus allow only the mutated sequence to bind to a chip-based sensor. We demonstrate excellent levels of sensitivity and specificity and show that the clamp assay accurately detects mutated sequences in a collection of samples taken from lung cancer and melanoma patients