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Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated society's tremendous health equity gap. Disadvantaged populations have been disproportionally affected by COVID-19, lacking access to affordable testing, a known effective tool for preventing viral spread, hospitalizations, and deaths. Here, we describe COvid-19 Low-cost Optodiagnostic for Rapid testing (COLOR), a colorimetric biosensor fabricated on cotton swabs using gold nanoparticles modified with human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), which costs 15 ¢ to produce and detects SARS-COV-2 within 5 minutes. COLOR detected very low viral particle loads (limit of detection: 0.154 pg mL⁻¹ of SARS-COV-2 spike protein) and its color intensity correlated with the cycle threshold (Ct) values obtained using RT-PCR. The performance of COLOR was assessed using 100 nasopharyngeal/oropharyngeal (NP/OP) clinical samples, yielding sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy values of 96%, 84%, and 90%, respectively. In summary, each COLOR test can be manufactured for 15 ¢ and presents rapid minute-timescale detection of SARS-COV-2, thus providing a solution to enable high-frequency testing, particularly in low-resource communities.

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