Detection of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (sars-cov-2) from oropharyngeal swab sample of cats in kelantan by using reverse transcription loop-mediated isothermal amplification (rt-lamp) and reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (rt-pcr) methods

Abstracts from research papers submitted to the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Universiti Malaysia Kelantan to fulfil part of the requirements of the course DVT 55204 – Research Project. Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) can be defined as the new disease that caused by a virus which is a novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS
CoV-2) that originally identified in the Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China (Cennimo, 2022). Apart from humans being infected and spreading Covid-19, there are studies
stating that the disease can also infect vertebrate animals such as cats. To date, there is no study has been conducted on the presence of SARS-CoV-2 in cats from Kelantan,
Malaysia. This research was conducted which aimed to detect the presence of SARS CoV-2 in cats from Kelantan. Sixteen swab samples from the oropharyngeal of cats were obtained from the archived samples of the virology laboratory of Faculty of Veterinary Medicine (FPV), UMK. Reverse transcription loop-mediated isothermal amplification (RT-LAMP) method used to detect the presence of SARS-CoV-2 and
further confirmed with reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) as a gold standard molecular method. One of the samples was positive with the RT-LAMP method but not with RT-PCR. This result indicates that SARS-CoV-2 presence in cats from Kelantan and RT-LAMP is more sensitive than RT-PCR. However, virus isolation needs to be conducted to further confirm this result.
Keywords: Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), Kelantan’s cats, RT-LAMP, RT-PCR