Nagy A, Ji?inec T, Ji?incová H, ?erníková L, et al. In silico re-assessment of a diagnostic RT-qPCR assay for universal detection of Influenza A viruses. Sci Rep. 2019 Feb 7;9(1):1630.
The ongoing evolution of microbial pathogens represents a significant issue in diagnostic PCR/qPCR. Many assays are burdened with false negativity due to mispriming and/or probe-binding failures. Therefore, PCR/qPCR assays used in the laboratory should be periodically re-assessed in silico on public sequences to evaluate the ability to detect actually circulating strains and to infer potentially escaping variants. In the work presented we re-assessed a RT-qPCR assay for the universal detection of influenza A (IA) viruses currently recommended by the European Union Reference Laboratory for Avian Influenza. To this end, the primers and probe sequences were challenged against more than 99,000 M-segment sequences in five data pools. To streamline this process, we developed a simple algorithm called the SequenceTracer designed for alignment stratification, compression, and personal sequence subset selection and also demonstrated its utility. The re-assessment confirmed the high inclusivity of the assay for the detection of avian, swine and human pandemic H1N1 IA viruses. On the other hand, the analysis identified human H3N2 strains with a critical probe-interfering mutation circulating since 2010, albeit with a significantly fluctuating proportion. Minor variations located in the forward and reverse primers identified in the avian and swine data were also considered.
See Also:
Latest articles in those days:
- High-throughput pseudovirus neutralisation maps the antigenic landscape of influenza A/H1N1 viruses 22 hours ago
- Timely vaccine strain selection and genomic surveillance improve evolutionary forecast accuracy of seasonal influenza A/H3N2 22 hours ago
- Evaluation of a Novel Data Source for National Influenza Surveillance: Influenza Hospitalization Data in the National Healthcare Safety Network, United States, September 2021-April 2024 22 hours ago
- Scenarios for pre-pandemic zoonotic influenza preparedness and response 22 hours ago
- Stability of Avian Influenza A(H5N1) Virus in Milk from Infected Cows and Virus-Spiked Milk 2 days ago
[Go Top] [Close Window]


