Widely Used Virus Assay Shown Unreliable When Compared To Other Methods
Thursday, October 22, 2009 - 23:35
in Biology & Nature
In the course of doing research on the mosquito-borne pathogens chikungunya virus and o' nyong-nyong virus, researchers have discovered an inconvenient truth about an assay, strand-specific quantitative real-time PCR (ssqPCR), increasingly being used to detect and measure replicating viral RNA in infected cells and tissues. The method most labs are using for ssqPCR is unreliable.