Suppression of the inhibitory effect of denatured albumin on the polymerase chain reaction by sodium octanoate: application to routine clinical detection of hepatitis B virus at its infectivity threshold in serum.

Ten to fifteen percent of posttransfusion viral hepatitis cases are still caused by HBV despite mandatory third generation screening procedures for HBsAg. There is thus an urgent need for a simple, time-cost-effective, but very sensitive test for routine HBV DNA detection in serum. Nested-primed PCR has been shown to detect purified HBV DNA at its infectivity threshold in serum.

Prevalence of high risk genital papillomaviruses in the Belgian female population determined by fast multiplex polymerase chain reaction.

Because in situ/filter hybridisation is not sensitive enough and because classical polymerase chain reaction (PCR) protocols are generally not sufficiently reproducible and specific, there is little accurate information on the prevalence of human papillomaviruses (HPV) 16, 18, and 33 infections in women without dyskaryotic changes of the cervix. In our hands, our Fast Multiplex PCR protocol has always been the most sensitive, specific, and reproducible DNA detection assay in all the microbiological and haematological applications we attempted (Vandenvelde C, Verstraete M, Van Beers D [1990]: Journal of Virological Methods 30:215-228; Vandenvelde C, Scheen R, Corazza F, Van Beers D [1991a]: Journal of Experimental and Clinical Hematology 33:293-297; Vandenvelde C, Scheen R, Van Beers D, Fondu P [1991b]: Journal of Experimental and Clinical Hematology 30:25-29). Using this new technique, cervical scrapes from 336 Belgian women attending the cervical cancer screening clinic were examined for the presence of these three high-risk genital papillomaviruses.

Fast PCR based therapeutic follow-up of T-cell malignancies.

Available methods for the detection of minimal residual disease in T-cell malignancies are limited by their poor sensitivity and/or by their complexity. With the aim of avoiding these drawbacks, we used the Fast PCR technique in order to amplify V delta 1-(D delta 1)-(D delta 2)-J delta 1 and V gamma I family-J gamma junctional sequences from nucleated cells of boiled bone marrow. We were thus able to detect malignant T-cells down to a dilution of 1 in 665 nucleated marrow cells, in less than 4 hours after sampling.