[Advance in loop-mediated isothermal amplification technique and its applications in point-of-care testing platforms]

Loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) is a novel in vitro nucleic acid amplification method conducted under isothermal conditions with the advantages of high specificity, sensitivity, rapidity and easy detection. Since it was established in 2000, it has been widely applied in various fields of analytical science including the diagnosis of a variety of pathogens, identification of embryo sex, detection of genetically modified organisms and cancer gene identification. Additionally, significant progress has been made in the optimization of the LAMP method, such as accelerated reactions, simplified sample processing, the realization of multiplex amplification, and the enhanced specificity of reaction and detection methods. LAMP technology also shows much potential to be adopted as part of point-of-care testing platforms by the micromation, automation and integration with other technologies such as Lab-on-a-Chip and digital nucleic acid amplification. This review summarizes the latest advances in the LAMP technique and its applications in developing point-of-care testing platforms.