Meningitis is a medical emergency, and it is crucial to diagnose it accurately and promptly in order to manage patients effectively. It would, therefore, be essential to introduce and have fast, accurate, and user-friendly methods to determine the cause of these infections. This study aimed to demonstrate a potentially cost-effective new approach for detecting meningitis using a paper-based vertical flow microarray, which could be useful in settings with limited resources.
We describe a multiplex paper microarray for detecting Neisseria meningitidis, Haemophilus influenzae, Streptococcus pneumoniae, and Salmonella spp. by the passive vertical flow of PCR-amplified clinical samples. A multibiotinylated amplicon was obtained as a product of PCR in the presence of both a biotinylated primer and biotin-11-dUTP. An enhancement step based on an enzyme-free gold enhancement protocol was also used to facilitate visual detection.
This study showed that the vertical flow microarray (previously evaluated for one pathogen) can discriminately detect the amplification results down to the 102 copies of DNA limit for four meningitis pathogens in a multiplexed set-up. The study further demonstrated the ability of this device and setup to detect three of the four pathogens from clinical biosamples.
This study demonstrated the capacity of a vertical flow microarray device to detect amplification products for four prevalent meningitis pathogens in a multiplex format. The vertical flow microarray demonstrated consistent visualization of the expected gene amplification results; however, indicating limitations in the pre- and amplification steps. This study highlights the potential of this multiplexing method for diagnosing meningitis and other syndromic diseases caused by various pathogens, especially in resource-limited areas.
Sensitive, simple, and accurate spectrophotometric methods have been developed for the assay of arrhythmias drug-dronedarone hydrochloride (DND) in bulk drug and pharmaceutical formulations. The proposed method is based on the oxidation reaction of DND with a known excess of cerium(IV) ammonium sulfate (Ce(IV)) as an oxidizing agent in acid medium, followed by the determination of the unreacted oxidant by adding a fixed amount of dye, e.g., amaranth (AM), methylene blue (MB), and indigocarmine (IC), followed by measuring the absorbance at 520, 664, and 610 nm, respectively. The effects of experimental conditions were studied and optimized. The beer's law was obeyed in the concentration ranges of 1.0–10, 1.0–15, and 1.0–8.0 μg mL-1 using AM, MB, and IC dyes, respectively, with a correlation coefficient ≥ 0.9992. The calculated molar absorptivity values are 3.6527 × 104, 3.1212 × 104, and 4.229 × 104 L mol-1 cm-1 using AM, MB, and IC dyes, respectively. The limits of detection and quantification were 0.30 and 1.0 µg mL-1, respectively, for the three methods. Intra-day and inter-day accuracy and precision of the methods have been evaluated. No interference was observed from the additives. The proposed methods were successfully applied to the assay of DND in tablet preparations and the results were statistically compared with those of the reported method by applying Student's t-test and F-test. The reliability of the methods was further ascertained by performing recovery studies using the standard addition method.