Lydia Sohn, CITRIS PI and Almy C. Maynard and Agnes Offield Maynard Chair in Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley, and her research team have demonstrated how their innovative test method, dubbed DIVER, can provide clearer insight into a population’s active COVID infections than current approaches.
“DIVER offers two key advantages over RT-qPCR [reverse transcription quantitative polymerase chain reaction] testing, which is considered the gold standard for SARS-CoV-2 detection,” said Sohn. “It can detect intact virus versus RNA fragments, and, more importantly, DIVER is effective in almost any sample volume size, making it perfect for pooled samples.”
This work was supported by a CITRIS COVID-19 Seed Award.