title: Point-of-care diagnostics for ricin exposure.
abstract: A long-sought milestone in the defense against bioterrorism is the development of rapid, simple, and near-patient assays for diagnostic and theranostic purposes. Here, we present a powerful test based on a host response to a biological weapon agent, namely the ricin toxin. A signature for exposure to ricin was extracted and characterized in mice and then integrated into a plastic microfluidic cartridge. This enabled early diagnosis of exposure to ricin in mice using a drop of whole blood in less than 1 h and 30 min. The cartridge stores the reagents and implements all of the steps of the analysis, including mRNA extraction from a drop of blood, followed by tens of parallel RT-qPCR reactions. The simple and low-cost microfluidic cartridge developed here may find other applications in point-of-care diagnostics.
authors.affiliation: CEA, IRTSV, Biologie à Grande Echelle, 17 rue des Martyrs, F-38054, Grenoble, Cedex 9, France. Xavier.Gidrol@cea.fr.
authors.forename: Mohamed Lemine Youba
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Diakite
authors.forename: Jérôme
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Rollin
authors.forename: Dorothée
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Jary
authors.forename: Jean
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Berthier
authors.forename: Chantal
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Mourton-Gilles
authors.forename: Didier
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Sauvaire
authors.forename: Cathy
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Philippe
authors.forename: Guillaume
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Delapierre
authors.forename: Xavier
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Gidrol
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D054045:Biological Warfare Agents; D006801:Humans; D056656:Lab-On-A-Chip Devices; D051379:Mice; D008807:Mice, Inbred BALB C; D019095:Point-of-Care Systems; D012276:Ricin / Q000506:poisoning*; D000068936:Theranostic Nanomedicine / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods
chemical_list: D054045:Biological Warfare Agents; D012276:Ricin