FULLY AUTOMATED, SAMPLE-TO-ANSWER DETECTION OF MIRNA DIRECTLY FROM WHOLE BLOOD WITH THERMALLY RESPONSIVE ALKANE PARTITIONS AND LIGATION LOOP-MEDIATED ISOTHERMAL AMPLIFICATION

Micro-RNAs (miRNAs) are small, non-coding RNAs that regulate cellular protein expression; abnormal expression of miRNAs can be indicative of disease.Rapid methods for miRNA detection are needed for early screening of diseases, but detection of miRNAs is difficult due to their small size (<25 bp), low concentration (<1 pM), and high sequence homology among similar miRNAs [1].Current miRNA detection methods suffer from low sensitivity, high cost, and multistep complexity, limiting their clinical translatability [2].Recent isothermal amplification methods have demonstrated high sensitivity, but they still lack an automated diagnostic platform to directly analyze patient samples.Here, we have designed the automated sample-to-answer assay platform (ASAP) for enriching and amplifying miRNA directly from whole blood.Proof-of-concept results indicate that our platform can quantify femtomolar levels of circulating miRNA from blood within 2 hours while only requiring a single manual step (sample input).