Development of an in situ magnetic beads based RT-PCR method for electrochemiluminescent detection of rotavirus

Abstract

Rotaviruses are double-stranded RNA viruses belonging to the family of enteric pathogens. It is a major cause of diarrhoeal disease in infants and young children worldwide. Consequently, rapid and accurate detection of rotaviruses is of great importance in controlling and preventing food- and waterborne diseases and outbreaks. Reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is a reliable method that possesses high specificity and sensitivity. It has been widely used to detection of viruses. Electrochemiluminescence (ECL) can be considered as an important and powerful tool in analytical and clinical application with high sensitivity, excellent specificity, and low cost. Here we have developed a method for the detection of rotavirus by combining in situ magnetic beads (MBs) based RT-PCR with ECL. RT of rotavirus RNA was carried out in a traditional way and the resulting cDNA was directly amplified on MBs. Forward primers were covalently bounded to MBs and reverse primers were labeled with tris-(2, 2’-bipyridyl) ruthenium (TBR). During the PCR cycling, the TBR labeled products were directly loaded and enriched on the surface of MBs. Then the MBs–TBR complexes could be analyzed by a magnetic ECL platform without any post-modification or post-incubation，which avoid some laborious manual operations and achieve rapid yet sensitive detection. In this study, rotavirus from fecal specimens was successfully detected within 2 h, and the limit of detection was estimated to be 10 4 copies/μL. This novel in situ MBs based RT-PCR with ECL detection method can be used for pathogen detection in food safety field and clinical diagnosis.