Publications by authors named "A Zafeiriadou"
Article Synopsis
- Molecular-based assays are widely used for detecting viruses in wastewater, but inhibitors present in the wastewater can lead to false negatives and underestimation of viral loads.
- Various strategies, including sample dilution and the use of inhibitor removal kits, have been tested to combat these issues, with the addition of T4 gene 32 protein showing the most significant improvement in detection accuracy.
- The optimized reverse-transcription PCR (RT-qPCR) method was effective for testing SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater and demonstrated a strong correlation with the more sensitive reverse-transcription droplet digital PCR (RT-ddPCR) method.
Background: After the occurrence of the COVID-19 pandemic, detection of other disseminated respiratory viruses using highly sensitive molecular methods was declared essential for monitoring the spread of health-threatening viruses in communities. The development of multiplex molecular assays are essential for the simultaneous detection of such viruses even at low concentrations. In the present study, a highly sensitive and specific multiplex one-step droplet digital PCR (RT-ddPCR) assay was developed for the simultaneous detection and absolute quantification of influenza A (IAV), influenza B (IBV), respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and beta-2-microglobulin transcript as an endogenous internal control (IC B2M).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSpike-Seq: An amplicon-based high-throughput sequencing approach for the sensitive detection and characterization of SARS-CoV-2 genetic variations in environmental samples.
Sci Total Environ
March 2024
Article Synopsis
- COVID-19 started in Wuhan, China, and since then, different versions of the virus have been found around the world.
- Scientists are using a method called wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) to check for the virus in community sewage, which helps track how the virus spreads.
- The study introduces a new technique called Spike-Seq that helps scientists find and measure specific parts of the virus's genes in wastewater, especially in Athens, Greece, showing that it can effectively identify major virus variants like Alpha, Delta, and Omicron.
Due to governments' actions to contain the spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the activity of common circulating respiratory viruses was significantly disrupted after the COVID-19 pandemic and thorough surveillance of respiratory pathogens was considered essential worldwide. Wastewater-based epidemiology has proven to be a valuable tool, that provides complementary information on disease outbreaks and is increasingly used to study the infection dynamics of other viruses, apart from SARS-CoV-2. The aims of the present study were the detection of four commonly circulating respiratory viruses: SARS-CoV-2, influenza A, B and Human Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), the evaluation of the COVID-19 pandemic impact on their seasonality and the determination of the possible common trends in the viral load of these viruses in the wastewater of the Attica region.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Metabolic reprogramming is now characterized as one of the core hallmarks of cancer, and it has already been shown that the altered genomic profile of metabolically rewired cancer cells can give valuable information. In this study, we quantified three Metabolism-Related Gene (MRG) transcripts in the circulating tumor cells (CTCs) of early stage NSCLC patients and evaluated their associations with epithelial and EMT markers.
Experimental Design: We first developed and analytically validated highly sensitive RT-qPCR assays for the quantification of , and transcripts, and further studied the expression of MRGs in CTCs that were isolated using a size-dependent microfluidic device (Parsortix, Angle) from the peripheral blood of: (a) 46 NSCLC patients at baseline, (b) 39/46 of these patients one month after surgery, (c) 10/46 patients at relapse and (d) 10 pairs of cancerous and adjacent non-cancerous FFPE tissues from the same NSCLC patients.