ORCID

Abstract

Rapid, highly sensitive, and accurate virus circulation monitoring techniques are critical to limit the spread of the virus and reduce the social and economic burden. Therefore, point-of-use diagnostic devices have played a critical role in addressing the outbreak of COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) viruses. This review provides a comprehensive overview of the current techniques developed for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 in various body fluids (e.g., blood, urine, feces, saliva, tears, and semen) and considers the mutations (i.e., Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Omicron). We classify and comprehensively discuss the detection methods depending on the biomarker measured (i.e., surface antigen, antibody, and nucleic acid) and the measurement techniques such as lateral flow immunoassay (LFIA), enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), reverse transcription loop-mediated isothermal amplification (RT-LAMP), microarray analysis, clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) and biosensors. Finally, we addressed the challenges of rapidly identifying emerging variants, detecting the virus in the early stages of infection, the detection sensitivity, selectivity, and specificity, and commented on how these challenges can be overcome in the future.

Keywords

Biosensors, Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, COVID-19 virus diagnosis, Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, Lateral flow immunoassay, Loop-mediated isothermal amplification, Microarray assays, Reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction

Publication Date

2022-01-01

Publication Title

TrAC - Trends in Analytical Chemistry

Volume

157

ISSN

0165-9936

Deposit Date

2026-07-16

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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