7430 – Point-of-Care Nucleic Acid Detection System – Rapid and Highly Sensitive

Nucleic acids, including micro RNAs (miRNAs) have been shown to be associated with many forms of cancer, neurodegeneration, autoimmune disorders, and infectious diseases. However, existing technologies to detect and quantify nucleic acids are slow, expensive, and cannot be conducted at point-of-care. Cornell researchers have devised a platform to enable point-of-care detection of target nucleic acids at room temperature that involves tethered enzymes which react to create a fluorescence signal when paired with specially designed capture oligonucleotides that bind to the target nucleic acid. As shown in figure 1, this platform is able to detect miRNAs in human plasma within one minute. Figure 1: Human plasma samples were (A) probed for a panel of naturally occurring miRNAs and (B) first treated with RNAse at room temperature which shows significant reduction in signal. Phillip Owh po62@cornell.edu 1-607-254-4508