Abstract
Various methods exist to detect an astrovirus infection. Current methods include electron microscopy (EM), cell culture, immunoassays, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and various other molecular approaches that can be applied in the context of diagnostic or in surveillance studies. With the advent of metagenomics, novel human astrovirus (HAstV) strains have been found in immunocompromised individuals in association with central nervous system (CNS) infections. This work reviews the past and current methods for astrovirus detection and their uses in both research laboratories and for medical diagnostic purposes.
Highlights
Astroviruses were first discovered in 2008 by electron microscopy (EM) examination of stool samples from children with diarrhea [1]
Astroviruses have been associated with severe avian diseases, and diagnosis can be made in severely affected flocks by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), using necropsy samples in specialized laboratories [15]
Direct EM is complicated by the fact that only a minority of virions exhibit a complete star-shaped structure, and careful searching may be necessary to distinguish between, for example, astrovirus and calicivirus [36], which are similar in size
Summary
Astroviruses were first discovered in 2008 by electron microscopy (EM) examination of stool samples from children with diarrhea [1]. Before the development of molecular techniques, EM was the only tool for laboratory diagnostics, as no cell line permissive for a broad range of strains was identified, precluding routine virus isolation. EM, and later polymerase chain reaction (PCR), increasingly demonstrated the role of astroviruses in diarrheal human disease in babies and infants (as well as in numerous animal species such as birds and mammals), and most of the population has demonstrated exposure to the virus, as is evidenced by antibody detection [2,3,4,5,6,7]. Unbiased high throughput sequencing (HTS) has identified the unexpected role of astroviruses from a specific clade in human [8,9,10,11,12] and bovine [13] encephalitis. This paper summarizes the current tools available for the identification of astroviruses in diagnostic or research applications
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