AQuA: Agglutination Quantification Assay
Research Summary: The Agglutination Quantification Assay (AQuA) is being developed to circumvent issues with state of the art point-of-care and in-the-field biodetection. ELISA, PCR and the related assays are colorimetric and require dyes, enzymes and/or expensive instrumentation. These assays also often include sample processing (growth, lysis and wash steps) that increase to sample-to-signal times, errors, signal variability, biohazardous waste, operation costs and operator risk. Efforts to quicken, condense, or otherwise increase portability of these assays have necessitated sacrificing performance and other capabilities. AQuA requires no sample processing steps, dyes, enzymes, expensive optics or filters. Instead, beads linked to antibodies are photographed. These images are then analyzed for clumping pattern intensity that correlates with target concentration.
