Amplification product inactivation

Abstract

With great power comes great responsibility. This popular Spider Man movie quote infers the relationship between molecular nucleic acid amplification methods and amplification product inactivation procedures. The power is the ability of molecular amplification methods to produce billions of copies of nucleic acid from one template strand. This technique has been modified and adapted to serve as a means to detect viral and bacterial nucleic acids in clinical settings. The use of molecular methods is constantly evolving and expanding in its utility in this arena. With these methods, it is possible to detect small amounts of herpes simplex virus (HSV) in an infant's cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) with suspected meningitis [1]. With the detection of HSV in the CSF, antiviral therapy can be continued with confidence that the therapy is preventing brain damage that can be caused by HSV [2]. Before the advent of nucleic acid amplification techniques, there was little to no chance of recovering the virus from this sample type with traditional viral laboratory methods [3]. Empiric antiviral therapy was either continued or stopped without objective data upon which to base the decision.