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Feluda Test
Why is it in News?
- CSIR Director General announced that Feluda test to be commercially available by month-end.
Details:
- FELUDA stands for FNCAS9 Editor-Limited Uniform Detection Assay.
- It is a coronavirus detection test developed by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and to be commercialised by Tata Sons.
- It still requires a nasal swab to be collected and sent to a lab.
- It promises to be quicker than the gold-standard test because it doesn’t need the expensive RT-PCR machine.
- A smaller, cheaper more portable machine called a thermocycler is employed.
- Once the viral RNA is extracted, it takes anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour to confirm presence of the virus.
- It uses a CRISPR-cas9 based system and therefore more accurate in detecting the virus.
- CRISPR-cas9 is a genome-editing tool.