Margot Peeters | PubMed Health

PubMed2005

Development, technical performance, and clinical evaluation of a NucliSens basic kit application for detection of enterovirus RNA in cerebrospinal fluid.

The combination of nucleic acid sequence-based amplification and electrochemiluminescence detection was used to develop an internally controlled, highly sensitive and specific assay for the detection of enterovirus (EV) RNA in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). The analytical performance of the assay was determined using both in vitro-transcribed EV RNAs and viral culture isolates. The sensitivity of the assay was 10 EV RNA copies per amplification reaction. The assay detected all enteroviral isolates tested with no cross-reactivity to 21 nonenteroviral species, including rhinovirus and parechovirus. The clinical performance of the assay was evaluated by testing 992 CSF specimens collected from adult and pediatric patients. NucliSens EV results from a subset of 327 CSF samples were compared to viral culture of nasopharyngeal specimens and rectal swabs (n = 195) and/or CSF (n = 212). Of the 212 CSF samples, 96 samples were positive by either the NucliSens EV assay (94/96; 97.9%) or culture (63/96; 65.6%), and 61/96 (63.5%) were positive by both methods. The inclusion of an EV-specific internal control monitored the entire process, including the efficiency of nucleic acid extraction, amplification, and detection. In total, only five blood-clotted CSF samples (0.5%) were inhibited. The NucliSens EV assay demonstrated superior sensitivity over viral culture (P < 0.001), excellent specificity, clear delineation of positive samples, and minimal amplification inhibition.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2004

A screening strategy for the development of enantiomeric separation methods in capillary electrophoresis.

Method development of enantiomeric separations in capillary electrophoresis (CE) is a time-consuming task, since finding the appropriate chiral selector is usually a "trial and error" process. It is impossible to predict the selectivity of a selector towards a certain enantiomer. Therefore, the affinity of all selectors has to be examined one at a time. In order to speed up this process, a strategy is proposed based on simple experimental design methodology. The approach includes first a screening in function of the pH to determine the optimal migration conditions followed by a selection of the right chiral selector by means of Taguchi designs. In the approach several variables, such as the type and concentration of cyclodextrin, the concentration of buffer electrolyte, and the percentage of organic modifier, are varied simultaneously to find initial separation conditions rapidly. The resulting initial separation conditions can be optimized in further steps to be more reproducible. We discuss the results of the approach when applied on a number of selected compounds that are recently in development at Johnson & Johnson--Pharmaceutical Research and Development. Parameters, such as quality of the separation and analysis time, are evaluated to determine initial separation conditions for each compound.

Cyclodextrins↗