Clinical Microbiology: Open Access

Novel approach for detection and genotyping of noroviruses

3^rd Global Microbiologists Annual Meeting

August 15-17, 2016 Portland, Oregon, USA

Yuan Hu, Huijun Yan, Mark Mammel and Haifeng Chen

U.S. Food & Drug Administration, USA

Posters & Accepted Abstracts: Clin Microbiol

Abstract:

Noroviruses (NoVs) are highly infectious and cause acute gastroenteritis in humans. NoVs have high levels of genetic sequence diversities, which lead to difficulties in designing robust universal primers to efficiently amplify specific viral genomes for molecular analysis. We here described the practicality of sequence-independent amplification combined with DNA microarray analysis for simultaneous detection and genotyping of human NoVs in fecal specimens. We showed that single primer isothermal linear amplification (Ribo-SPIA) of genogroup I (GI) and genogroup II (GII) NoVs could be run through the same amplification protocol without the need to design and use any virus specific primers. Related virus could be subtyped by the unique pattern of hybridization with the amplified product to the microarray. By testing 22 clinical fecal specimens obtained from acute gastroenteritis cases as blinded samples, two were GI positive and 18 were GII positive as well as 2 negative for NoVs. NoV GII positive specimen was also identified as having co-occurrence of hepatitis A virus. The study showed that there was 100% concordance for positive NoV detection at genogroup level between the results of Ribo-SPIA/ microarray and the phylogenetic analysis of viral sequences of the capsid gene. This efficient broad range microarray detection method represents a valuable tool for norovirus study and outbreaks investigation.

Biography :

Yuan Hu has received his MD from Guangzhou Medical University (1983) and MS (1990) in Pharmaceutical Sciences from St. John’s University, New York. He is a Research Microbiologist at U.S. Food & Drug Administration. He is also a licensed Clinical Laboratory Director in New York State. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles, books chapter and abstracts.

Email: Yuan.Hu@fda.hhs.gov