Team describes rapid, sensitive test for HIV mutations
Tests that can distinguish whether HIV-positive people are infected with a drug-resistant strain or a non-resistant strain allow patients to get the most effective treatment as quickly as possible. A team of Brown University researchers describes a new method that works faster and more sensitively in lab testing than the current standard technologies.
The main advance enabling that improved performance is that the system operates directly on the virus’ more readily available RNA rather than requiring extra, potentially error-prone steps to examine DNA derived from RNA. In a single tube, the system can first combine two engineered probes (ligation) if a mutation is present and then make many copies of those combined probes (amplification) for detection.
“LRA (ligation on RNA amplification) uniquely optimizes two enzymatic reactions — RNA-based ligation, and quantitative PCR (polymerase chain reaction) amplification — into a single system,” said Anubhav Tripathi, professor of engineering at Brown and corresponding author on the paper. “Each HIV contains about 10,000 nucleotides, or building blocks, in its genetic material, and a drop of blood from a patient with resistant HIV can contain thousands to millions of copies of HIV. To find that one virus, out of thousands to millions, which is mutated at just a single nucleotide is like finding a needle in a haystack.”
The experiments reported in the paper show that the LRA test was sensitive enough to find a commonly sought K103N mutation in concentrations as low as one mutant per 10,000 strands of “normal” viral RNA. The LRA detection worked within two hours, while alternative technologies such as ASPCR or pyrosequencing, can take as long as eight.
LRA works by sending in many copies of a pair of short engineered probes of genetic material to complement the RNA in the HIV sample. Under optimized conditions, those pairs that perfectly match the target HIV RNA containing a mutation that causes drug resistance can rapidly become fused together, or ligated, by an enzyme. If there is a single nucleotide difference, the pair won’t fuse.
The fusing of the engineered genetic probes is designed to happen at room temperature. After a short period, the LRA system then heats the slightly alkaline solution, which shuts off the fusing reaction but turns on the amplification (copying) of fused pairs. That allows the LRA system to produce a strong signal of fused pairs, if there are any. All this happens in a single step, without any need to change solution. Brown University
