Examine, a free weekly newsletter covering science with a sceptical, evidence-based eye, is sent every Tuesday. You’re reading an excerpt – sign up to get the whole newsletter in your inbox.
In early 2022, I joined the spluttering hordes queueing up to find out whether the virus we’d spent the past two years avoiding had finally caught up with us.
Multiple rapid antigen tests told me I didn’t have COVID-19, but my headache and burning fever said otherwise. Almost everyone I knew was either sick or isolating – a New Year’s hangover of epic proportions.
Endless queues of cars and pedestrians outside pop-up COVID-19 testing clinics are one of the lingering images of the pandemic.Credit: Flavio Brancaleone
By the time the PCR results came back positive five days later, I was halfway through my isolation period and on the mend.
Essential as they were in the fight against COVID, my experience (and that of thousands of other Australians) shows the limitations of unreliable RATs and a cumbersome PCR testing regime that cracked under pressure and has now been mostly phased out.
“A RAT is not really very sensitive … and PCR is not going to get out of the lab,” says Professor Ewa Goldys, whose team of Sydney scientists believe they have found the answer: a “lab in your pocket” device that looks and functions just like a rapid antigen test, but has the accuracy of a lab-based PCR.
In a study published in Nature Communications on Tuesday (AEDT), the researchers from the University of NSW and Garvan Institute combined Nobel prize-winning science with tiny DNA nano-circles to detect a target gene sequence (in this case, that of COVID-19) in just a few molecules of a chosen sample.
Many Australians have had mixed experiences with rapid antigen tests, or RATs.Credit: Flavio Brancaleone
The technology could also be used to detect potential invasive marine species, indicate the presence or absence of a particular threatened species in environment samples, or even monitor cancer mutations in patients.
COVID testing is expensive and unreliable. Scientists think there’s a better way
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05.03.2024
Examine, a free weekly newsletter covering science with a sceptical, evidence-based eye, is sent every Tuesday. You’re reading an excerpt – sign up to get the whole newsletter in your inbox.
In early 2022, I joined the spluttering hordes queueing up to find out whether the virus we’d spent the past two years avoiding had finally caught up with us.
Multiple rapid antigen tests told me I didn’t have COVID-19, but my headache and burning fever said otherwise. Almost everyone........
© The Sydney Morning Herald
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