Developing Assays for the Detection of Influenza in Human Samples

摘要

A pipeline was created to design nucleic acid-based assays for the detection of any organism of interest with an unprecedentedly high specificity and sensitivity. First, the specificity of all subsequences present in each target organism's genome is assessed through exhaustive comparisons with the genomes of non-targets likely to be present in a clinical or field sample. Next, the minimum set of ultraspecific sequences is determined such that all of the target genomes are expected to hybridize with some or all members of the set. Using this pipeline, the minimum number of ultraspecific primer pairs and probes needed to detect 5,000+ strains of influenza A and B in the presence of human DNA was determined. The sets identified here are predicted to be more sensitive and specific to influenza than currently used tests.