RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Point-of-care biomarker quantification enabled by sample-specific calibration
JF Science Advances
JO Sci Adv
FD American Association for the Advancement of Science
SP eaax4473
DO 10.1126/sciadv.aax4473
VO 5
IS 9
A1 McNerney, Monica P.
A1 Zhang, Yan
A1 Steppe, Paige
A1 Silverman, Adam D.
A1 Jewett, Michael C.
A1 Styczynski, Mark P.
YR 2019
UL http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/9/eaax4473.abstract
AB Easy-to-perform, relatively inexpensive blood diagnostics have transformed at-home healthcare for some patients, but they require analytical equipment and are not easily adapted to measuring other biomarkers. The requirement for reliable quantification in complex sample types (such as blood) has been a critical roadblock in developing and deploying inexpensive, minimal-equipment diagnostics. Here, we developed a platform for inexpensive, easy-to-use diagnostics that uses cell-free expression to generate colored readouts that are visible to the naked eye, yet quantitative and robust to the interference effects seen in complex samples. We achieved this via a parallelized calibration scheme that uses the patient sample to generate custom reference curves. We used this approach to quantify a clinically relevant micronutrient and to quantify nucleic acids, demonstrating a generalizable platform for low-cost quantitative diagnostics.