Panmicrobial Oligonucleotide Array for Diagnosis of Infectious Diseases

• DOI: 10.3201/eid1301.060837
• Publication Date: 2009-08-19T16:43:33Z
• Authors: Gustavo Palacios; Phenix-Lan Quan; Omar J. Jabado; Sean Conlan; David L. Hirschberg; Yang Liu; Junhui Zhai; Neil Renwick; Jeffrey Hui; Hedi Hegyi; Allen Grolla; James E. Strong; Jonathan S. Towner; Thomas W. Geisbert; Peter B. Jahrling; Cornelia Büchen-O...; Heinz Ellerbrok; Maria Paz Sanchez...; Yves Lussier; Pierre Formenty; Stuart T. Nichol; Heinz Feldmann; Thomas Briese; W. Ian Lipkin
• Keywords: Epidemiology; 610; communicable diseases; Infectious and parasitic diseases; RC109-216; Communicable diseases; Communicable Diseases; Sensitivity and Specificity; Disease Outbreaks; 03 medical and health sciences; Fatal Outcome; Virology; differential diagnosis; Humans; viral hemorrhagic fever; Malaria, Falciparum; Phylogeny; Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis; 0303 health sciences; Research; R; microarray analytical devices; Malaria; 3. Good health; Virus Diseases; Medicine; oligonucleotide microarrays

To facilitate rapid, unbiased, differential diagnosis of infectious diseases, we designed GreeneChipPm, a panmicrobial microarray comprising 29,455 sixty-mer oligonucleotide probes for vertebrate viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites. Methods for nucleic acid preparation, random primed PCR amplification, and labeling were optimized to allow the sensitivity required for application with nucleic acid extracted from clinical materials and cultured isolates. Analysis of nasopharyngeal aspirates, blood, urine, and tissue from persons with various infectious diseases confirmed the presence of viruses and bacteria identified by other methods, and implicated Plasmodium falciparum in an unexplained fatal case of hemorrhagic feverlike disease during the Marburg hemorrhagic fever outbreak in Angola in 2004-2005.