07 Jun Rapid molecular diagnostic test for Zika virus with low demands on sample preparation and instrumentation
Eboigbodin K.E. et al., Diagnostic Microbiology and Infectious Disease, 2016
Recent worldwide large outbursts of the ZIKV necessitate the availability of a rapid, cost-effective and quick diagnostic method for ZIKV detection. Conventional diagnostic methods rely upon serological methods or nucleic acid amplification tests (NAATs), both of which are time consuming. The authors present an improved alternative to NAATs; the reverse transcriptase strand invasion based amplification (RT-SIBA), which has been used previously for rapid detection of DNA and RNA. RT-SIBA is essentially parallel to the PCR reaction. The investigators compared the method with conventional ones to assess the applicability, functionality (on the basis of reaction completion time and sample purity), specificity (with respect to sample source), performance (with respect to viral load) and reproducibility (in-field; on different types of in-house instruments). They established that this method was specific for the ZIKV, showed a lesser reaction completion time, independent of the degree of purity of the sample and showed comparable results when performed using in-house instruments. This method may be a powerful molecular diagnostic tool for ZIKV detection and finds an application during outbreaks, thus allowing treatment management and preventing the spread of the virus, especially in low-resource areas. Nevertheless, the assay still needs to be fully validated for direct detection of clinical specimens infected with the ZIKV.
http://www.dmidjournal.com/article/S0732-8893(16)30267-X/pdf
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