Development of an on-site diagnostic system for infectious diseases:
evaluation using blood samples containing the bovine leukemia DNA
Abstract
Along with progress in globalization of society, the spread of
infectious diseases has accelerated worldwide. Although the deployment
of highly sensitive genetic tests is essential for early diagnosis and
early containment of potential epidemics, tedious and expensive nucleic
acid extraction steps represent a major drawback. Here we developed a
simple and rapid DNA extraction method, named as an EZ-Fast kit,
applicable to the epidemic field setting. The kit does not require
advanced laboratory equipment or expensive DNA extraction kits and
achieves crude DNA extraction within 10 min at extremely low cost. When
combined with real-time PCR and LAMP analyses, the performance of the
method, using 183 bovine blood samples, was similar to that of the
existing DNA extraction method: 92.5% (135/146) (real-time PCR) and
93.7% (133/142) (LAMP) diagnostic sensitivities, and 100% diagnostic
specificities. The developed system provides a powerful tool to
facilitate on-site diagnosis in an epidemic field setting.