A reverse transcriptase loop-mediated isothermal amplification (RT-LAMP) assay was developed for detecting infectious hematopoietic necrosis virus (IHNV) from chum salmon Oncorhynchus keta in South Korea with high specificity, sensitivity and rapidity. A set of 6 IHNV-specific primers was designed, based on the G-protein sequence of IHNV (PRT strain), recognizing 8 distinct sequences of the target RNA. The assay was optimized to detect IHNV at 63°C for 30 min. The limit of detection was 0.01 fg of RNA extracted from IHNV-infected CHSE-214 cells, compared with 1.0 fg for nested RT-PCR. The applicability of this RT-LAMP assay was further tested by comparison with nested RT-PCR using field samples. Of 473 samples tested, 191 samples (40.38%) were IHNVpositive by RT-LAMP, whereas 162 samples (34.25%) were IHNV-positive by nested RT-PCR. These results indicate that, because of its high sensitivity and rapidity, the RT-LAMP assay is useful for early diagnosis of IHN.
KEY WORDS: RT-LAMP · IHNV · Chum salmon · Oncorhynchus keta
Resale or republication not permitted without written consent of the publisherDis Aquat Org 94: [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] 2011 method. However, nested RT-PCR methods require a second amplification step that is prone to contamination. To solve these problems, the loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) assay was investigated as an alternative. LAMP was originally developed by Notomi et al. (2000) and can amplify very low numbers of target sequences to 10 9 copies under isothermal conditions within 1 h. This method depends on auto-cycling strand displacement DNA synthesis by the Bst DNA polymerase large fragment with high strand displacement activity, and a set of 2 specially designed inner primers and 2 outer primers. LAMP is highly specific because the target sequences are detected by 6 independent primers in the initial stage, followed by 4 independent primers in the later stages of the LAMP reaction. LAMP is also applicable for RNA detection by using a reverse transcriptase (RT) together with a DNA polymerase (Notomi et al. 2000). This technique can be carried out under isothermal conditions, which can be simply achieved with a water bath or a heating block. Expensive thermal cyclers used for PCR are not required (Notomi et al. 2000).In the present study, an RT-LAMP assay was developed for detecting IHNV from wild adult chum salmon Oncorhynchus keta and artificially hatched fry in Korea. A set of 6 LAMP-specific primers was designed, based on the G protein sequence of Korean IHNV (PRT strain, accession no. AY673684). The applicability of the RT-LAMP assay was evaluated by comparison with the nested RT-PCR assay using field samples.
MATERIALS AND METHODSViruses and cell culture. IHNV (PRT strain) was amplified in chinook salmon embryo (CHSE)-214 cells. Infectious pancreatic necrosis virus (IPNV) (VR-299, Jasper, Sp and Ab strains) and viral hemorrhagic septicemia virus (VHSV) were maintained in rainbow trout gonad (RTG)-2 cells with minimum essential medium-10 (supplemented wit...