{"doi":"10.1101/2022.09.18.508442","title":"HCR Lateral Flow Assays for Amplified Instrument-Free At-Home SARS-CoV-2 Testing","abstract":"ABSTRACT The lateral flow assay format enables rapid, instrument-free, at-home testing for SARS-CoV-2. Due to the absence of signal amplification, this simplicity comes at a cost in sensitivity. Here, we enhance sensitivity by developing an amplified lateral flow assay that incorporates isothermal, enzyme-free signal amplification based on the mechanism of hybridization chain reaction (HCR). The simplicity of the user experience is maintained using a disposable 3-channel lateral flow device to automatically deliver reagents to the test region in three successive stages without user interaction. To perform a test, the user loads the sample, closes the device, and reads the result by eye after 60 minutes. Detecting gamma-irradiated SARS-CoV-2 virions in a mixture of saliva and extraction buffer, the current amplified HCR lateral flow assay achieves a limit of detection of 200 copies/ μ L using available antibodies to target the SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein. By comparison, five commercial unamplified lateral flow assays that use proprietary antibodies exhibit limits of detection of 500 copies/ μ L, 1000 copies/ μ L, 2000 copies/ μ L, 2000 copies/ μ L, and 20,000 copies/ μ L. By swapping out antibody probes to target different pathogens, amplified HCR lateral flow assays offer a platform for simple, rapid, and sensitive at-home testing for infectious disease. As an alternative to viral protein detection, we further introduce an HCR lateral flow assay for viral RNA detection. HCR lateral flow assay Amplified Instrument-free At-home 60 min Naked eye SARS-CoV-2 200 copies/ μ L","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2022,"id":311479,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9506,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":983105,"name":"Jining Huang","orcid":"0000-0002-3798-4790","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":277578,"name":"Niles A. Pierce","orcid":"0000-0003-2367-4406","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":634129,"name":"Samuel J. Schulte","orcid":"0000-0001-9982-6504","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":33,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:33:28.480200Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}