How does the AccordQuick system improve reaction efficiency and reagent utilization in swine pathogen detection?
Publish Time: 2025-12-08
In modern large-scale pig farming, rapid and accurate disease diagnosis is crucial for successful prevention and control. Pathogens such as African swine fever virus, porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus, porcine circovirus, and pseudorabies virus spread rapidly and have high mortality rates. Traditional laboratory testing procedures are cumbersome, time-consuming, and highly dependent on personnel and equipment, making it difficult to meet the practical needs of farms for "early detection and early treatment." The emergence of the AccordQuick system, a fully automated membrane microfluidic nucleic acid detection system, is significantly improving the reaction efficiency and reagent utilization of swine pathogen detection through a revolutionary technological approach, injecting new intelligent momentum into animal disease prevention and control.
The core of the AccordQuick system lies in its integrated membrane microfluidic chip. This chip miniaturizes and integrates the entire process of nucleic acid extraction, purification, PCR amplification, and fluorescence detection onto a credit card-sized plastic film. The entire reaction system volume is compressed to microliters, only 1/3 to 1/10 of the traditional qPCR reaction system. This means a significant reduction in expensive reagents such as enzymes, primers, probes, and buffers consumed per test, resulting in a substantial decrease in the cost per test. For large-scale pig farms requiring high-frequency screening, the long-term accumulated reagent savings are extremely considerable.
Traditional nucleic acid testing involves multiple steps, including sample lysis, nucleic acid extraction, pipetting, PCR amplification, and result interpretation, taking 2–4 hours in total. It is also highly susceptible to false negatives/false positives due to operational errors or cross-contamination. AccordQuick, however, employs a fully automated "sample in—result out" design: simply add the processed pig serum, tissue homogenate, or swab eluent to the chip slot, and the instrument automatically completes all subsequent processes. The entire testing cycle is shortened to 30–60 minutes, increasing efficiency by more than 3 times. More importantly, the fully enclosed system eliminates the risk of aerosol contamination, ensuring reliable results, making it particularly suitable for use in grassroots veterinary stations or farms with limited biosafety conditions.
3. Precise Temperature Control and Efficient Heat Transfer: Accelerating PCR Kinetics
The thin-film microfluidic structure has an extremely high specific surface area and an extremely thin heat conduction path, enabling the reaction chamber within the chip to respond rapidly to temperature changes. The AccordQuick system achieves a temperature change rate of up to 5–8°C/second through a precision thermoelectric module, far exceeding traditional metal block PCR instruments. This not only shortens the time required for each stage of denaturation, annealing, and extension, but also improves amplification specificity—especially for porcine pathogens with high GC content or complex secondary structures, effectively reducing non-specific amplification and improving detection sensitivity.
For common mixed infections in swine herds, AccordQuick supports simultaneous detection of multiple fluorescence channels. A single chip can be pre-loaded with multiple independent reaction chambers, each amplifying different pathogen targets in parallel. This means that multiple pathogens can be screened with a single sample addition and a single run, eliminating the need for repeated sampling and instrumentation. This significantly improves the efficiency of sample and human resource utilization and avoids the accumulation of errors caused by multiple operations.
The AccordQuick system, through miniaturization, integration, and automation using thin-film microfluidics technology, has achieved multiple breakthroughs in swine pathogen detection, including a sharp reduction in reagent consumption, a leap in detection speed, a lower operational threshold, and improved result reliability. It is not just an instrument, but a bridge bringing high-end molecular diagnostic capabilities to frontline farming scenarios.
