No matter the nature of the Covid tests, they must first go through a specialized laboratory for analysis. In the Netherlands, a researcher has developed a kit to achieve the result at home using two very simple objects:a coffee capsule and a pot of boiling water.
In our country, no less than 3.5 million tests are carried out every week. Nasopharyngeal or salivary, these same tests end up in laboratories and undergo several treatments . The laboratory technicians carry out an extraction, an amplification then a passage in a thermocycler. There are also self-tests, which you can do yourself. On the other hand, DNA is not amplified in any way, so the reliability is lower.
Vittorio Saggiomo is a bionanotechnology researcher at Wageningen University (Netherlands). The interested party invented a new process, described in a pre-publication on the ChemRxiv platform on March 23, 2021. According to the researcher, this is a safe do-it-yourself test using a pan boiling water and a pod of Nespresso coffee.
Baptized CoroNaspresso, this innovation would be cheap and easy to manufacture in several million copies. Vittorio Saggiomo also mentions the universality of the product, as well as a very interesting characteristic for the protection of the environment:zero waste.
This test method uses loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP). The latter uses primers capable of recognizing specific regions of the target DNA. First, a DNA polymerase moves the strands, initiating synthesis. Then two of the primers form loop structures. The objective? Facilitate subsequent rounds of amplification. According to Vittorio Saggiomo, the sample is exposed to a reagent capable of testifying – by fluorescence – whether the test in question is positive or negative.
The CoroNaspresso test is amplified similar to the RT-PCR test . However, this is characterized by a constant temperature necessary for the amplification reaction, namely 65°C. On the other hand, it is incumbent to control the temperature well, a control being done using a phase change material and not an electronic thermostat (too expensive). The researcher used a paraffin bearing the name Rubitherm®, which melts precisely at 65°C. It is also very cheap, namely 0.13 euro per kg. Then, the interested party selected a heat-resistant container – the famous coffee capsule – in order to place the paraffin.
In the end, all you have to do is place the sample in the capsule and immerse it in boiling water for 25 minutes . At the end, the person must observe the color of the tube containing a reagent whose color changes according to the pH. Eventually, the test turns out to be yellow (positive) or orange (negative). Tested on 6 people, 3 of whom had the coronavirus, the CoroNaspresso showed a success rate of 100%. This test whose manufacturing cost is only 0.20 euro could be widely adopted. On the other hand, the work of Vittorio Saggiomo has not yet been validated by peers.
