Abstract
In this work, we developed a simple and robust assay to rapidly detect SNPs in nucleic acid samples. Our approach combines loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP)-based target amplification with fluorescent probes to detect SNPs with high specificity. A competitive "sink" strand preferentially binds to non-SNP amplicons and shifts the free energy landscape to favor specific activation by SNP products. We demonstrated the broad utility and reliability of our SNP-LAMP method by detecting three distinct SNPs across the human genome. We also designed an assay to rapidly detect highly transmissible severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) variants from crude biological samples. This work demonstrates that competitive SNP-LAMP is a powerful and universal method that could be applied in point-of-care settings to detect any target SNP with high specificity and sensitivity. We additionally developed a publicly available web application for researchers to design SNP-LAMP probes for any target sequence of interest.