Point-of-need molecular processing of biosamples using portable instrumentation to reduce turnaround time

Infectious agents,both standard and emerging or engineered,might initiate outbreaks with global impact and/or existential-level threat potential.Such agents might infect human,livestock,exploitable plant cultures or the environment at large.Instead of responding by sampling teams which may also carry out prolonged surveillance,a more effective concept is to pre-process the samples,possibly to nucleic acid extract so as to transport them without biological risks by standard channels,or to process them up to a point and return the results,leaving the samples which only need specialized tests and dedicated equipment.In this context a portable device,allowing multiple routine and crisis-management applications due to its inherent flexibility,is scrutinized against alternatives and possible needs so as to develop a novel standard of surveillance and intervention,meant to facilitate containment by providing faster much more reliable laboratory results at a fraction of older generation mobile nucleic acids analyzers.Additional steps,such as agarose in pills and buffers pre-packaged in expendable syringes with pistons locked by improvised safety features may improve the Complexity Level of the whole system so as to make it appealing to intervention/crisis management personnel,while the instrument proper may double as backup for respective benchtop devices.