Shining a new light on virus detection

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Influenza is one of the more serious public health threats around the world. Common flu may be just a small, if inconvenient, part of modern life but large pandemics are a much greater cause for concern. Consider this: in the first two months of 2015, over 300 people died from a particularly virulent flu outbreak in Hong Kong. There is a very urgent need to develop diagnostic methods that are accurate and rapid enough to change the situation, save lives and limit suffering.

The PolyU teams led by Prof. Hao Jianhua, Associate Head at the Department of Applied Physics, and Dr Yang Mo, Associate Professor at the Interdisciplinary Division of Biomedical Engineering, have started along that path by developing the upconversion luminescence resonance energy transfer-powered nanobionsensor for ultrasensitive virus detection. As Prof. Hao put it, “with the sensor’s simple operational procedures, the testing duration for influenza has decreased massively from 1-3 days to 2-3 hours for only HK$20 per sample – far quicker than traditional clinical methods at 80% less cost”.

Overcoming traditional limitations

When working on the new sensor, the teams were still seeking to overcome the limits of traditional biological methods. Optical detection, which has high sensitivity, is a more viable option for rapid virus detection. Yet the conventional method used in biological application, downconversion luminescence, is excited by high-energy sources such as ultraviolet light, which can damage genetic material and induce background florescence.