Detection of viral RNA splicing in diagnostic virology

Abstract

Diagnostic virology is to identify the etiologic cause of infection from patient's samples. In the past the diagnostic virology relied on three classical techniques to make a diagnosis of viral infection: (a) virus isolation by direct virus cultivation, (b) viral antigen detection, (c) indirect detection of virus-specific antibodies. While being important tools in the diagnostic virology today, these techniques are time-consuming and require specific tools such as cultivation media, cell or tissue cultures, antibodies, purified antigens. In the past decade the number of new molecular-based methods grew rapidly and gained more popularity in diagnostic labs. The core of these techniques constitutes of techniques based on nucleic acid detection by specific amplification, hybridization, and/or sequencing (reviewed in ref. [1]). The most nucleic acid-based diagnostic methods are simple, speed, sensitive and specific and thus meet the gold four-S-standard for their application in any diagnostic laboratories. The methods are simple and speed because only a specific primer pair and a PCR machine are needed in a lab setting and identification of a viral pathogen takes within few hours. They are sensitive and specific and require only a small amount of patients' materials to detect a specific nucleotide sequence region. In general, these techniques can be used to detect almost all types of viral pathogens and even to identify multiple viral pathogens or their variants at the same time. In this chapter we focus on detection of viral RNA splicing as a new tool for diagnostic virology.