A university in Netherlands, Eindhoven institute of technology discovered a protein that is a variety of luciferase that generates light based on the concentration of the analyte. They also modified it so that another protein that is integrated to the same protein converts the light that is emitted to another color based on the binding of the antibody. This antibody can also be titrated based on the change of color. This phenomenon is called BRET (Bioluminescence resonance energy transfer) and the protein is something that they called LUMABS.
What is unique in their setup is that a) no washing step is required b) this has a good signal to noise ratio c) a paper layer separates the whole blood into components that can be measured and d) the paper layers also separate the dye, furimazine from the antibody and the rest of the complex reactions
This originally appeared on their website with very minimal details but very enchanting title mentioning “glow in the dark” here:
The details of the discovery are very sketchy – it is possible that the University is trying to guard their discovery and protect some of the key elements. However, the full details are published in a paper here: which has a wonderful image to explain their method.
But even under these conditions it is amazing how much of this is publicized all over the web.
Some of the sites that mention this minimal discovery are:
https://phys.org/news/2018-10-glow-in-the-dark-paper-rapid-infectious-diseases.html
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-10/euot-gpa100318.php
https://flipboard.com/article/glow-in-the-dark-paper-as-a-rapid-test-for-infectious-diseases/f-4812a7f6b4%2Fphys.org
https://www.elektormagazine.com/news/glow-in-the-dark-paper-tests-for-infectious-diseases
https://www.medicaldevice-network.com/news/paper-strip-test-infectious-diseases/
https://www.medgadget.com/2018/10/glow-in-the-dark-paper-test-rapidly-detects-infectious-diseases.html
The various websites are reproducing the content on the central website and then interpreting it but almost none of those websites are providing any details. The medgadget website is probably the only one that provided the original reference for the discovery.
The graph shows that the linking of the website somehow became very popular and it led to many more links by other websites as you can see in the graph
Curious to understand the reason for this ….