Evaluation of Extraction Methods for Efficient Detection of Enteric Viruses in Pork Meat Products

Abstract

We report an in-house protocol for extraction and purification of nucleic acids of enteric viruses, which gives more consistent results than representative commercial methods. The protocol uses 4 M guanidine thiocyanate, 0.5% N-lauroylsarcosine sodium salt, and 25 mM sodium citrate pH 7.0 supplemented with 0.14 M β-mercaptoethanol for lysis of virus particles. The addition of TRIzol followed by chloroform-based separation of the aqueous phase is used to purify nucleic acids from the lysate. RNA precipitation is performed using lithium chloride. This protocol was compared with QIAGEN’s RNeasy Kit and bioMerieux’s NucliSens method, by evaluating the ability of each to detect enteric viruses in a complex food matrix. Three different pork products, i.e., cooked ham, liver, and Spanish fermented sausage (“chorizo”) were artificially contaminated with decreasing numbers of murine norovirus 1 and human adenovirus 2. The extracted and purified viral nucleic acids were detected by real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assays. Whereas the two commercial extraction methods did not facilitate robust results (quantification was only possible with some viruses and/or some matrices), when coupled with the in-house protocol the linearity and the efficiency of the quantitative reverse transcription-PCR (qRT-PCR) assays were close to 1 in all the food matrices, independent of the virus. Scalability of the in-house method was evaluated by analysis of 1 and 2.5 g of spiked pig liver samples, and quantification was possible on 1 g samples contaminated with any of the two model viruses. Therefore, the in-house protocol facilitates robust qRT-PCR-based quantitative detection of viruses in pork products, and is moreover relatively cheap and simple to perform.