Systematic Evaluation of Different Nucleic Acid Amplification Assays for Cytomegalovirus Detection: Feasibility of Blood Donor Screening.

ABSTRACT: Acute primary cytomegalovirus (CMV) infections, which commonly occur asymptomatically among blood donors, represent a significant risk for serious morbidity in immunocompromised patients (a major group of transfusion recipients). We implemented a routine CMV pool screening procedure for plasma for the identification of CMV DNA-positive donors, and we evaluated the sensitivities and performance of different CMV DNA amplification systems. Minipools (MPs) of samples from 18,405 individual donors (54,451 donations) were screened for CMV DNA using the RealStar CMV PCR assay (Altona Diagnostic Technologies), with a minimum detection limit of 11.14 IU/ml. DNA was extracted with a high-volume protocol (4.8 ml, Chemagic Viral 5K kit; PerkinElmer) for blood donor pool screening (MP-nucleic acid test

SUBMITTER: Vollmer T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4572558 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature