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Optical detection of infectious SARS-CoV-2 virions by counting spikes.

Denis S KudryavtsevVera A MozhaevaIgor A IvanovAndrey E SiniavinAlexey S KalmykovAnton S GritchenkoBoris Nikolayevich KhlebtsovShao-Peng WangBin KangVictor I TsetlinVictor I BalykinPavel N Melentiev
Published in: Nanoscale (2024)
Existing methods for the mass detection of viruses are limited to the registration of small amounts of a viral genome or specific protein markers. In spite of high sensitivity, the applied methods cannot distinguish between virulent viral particles and non-infectious viral particle debris. We report an approach to solve this long-standing challenge using the SARS-CoV-2 virus as an example. We show that wide-field optical microscopy with the state-of-the-art mesoscopic fluorescent labels, formed by a core-shell plasmonic nanoparticle with fluorescent dye molecules in the core-shell that are strongly coupled to the plasmonic nanoparticle, not only rapidly, i.e. in less than 20 minutes after sampling, detects SARS-CoV-2 virions directly in a patient sample without a pre-concentration step, but can also distinguish between infectious and non-infectious virus strains by counting the spikes on the lipid envelope of individual viral particles.
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