Journal article

Stability of dried blood spots for HIV-1 drug resistance analysis

AC Hearps, CE Ryan, LM Morris, MM Plate, V Greengrass, SM Crowe

Current HIV Research | BENTHAM SCIENCE PUBL LTD | Published : 2010

Abstract

The wide scale application of dried blood spots (DBS) as a collection tool for low-cost HIV drug resistance testing requires a greater understanding of the accuracy of DBS for genotype analysis and the stability of DBS under various environmental conditions. Analysis of a 50μl DBS via a single amplicon, nested PCR-based in-house assay (the Burnet genotyping assay) showed an average nucleotide concordance of 98.9% with plasma samples, although only 65% of nucleotide mixtures detected in plasma were also detected within DBS. The analysis of three DBS resulted in the detection of a greater number of nucleotide mixtures (72 and 109 mixtures detected within one and three DBS, respectively, n = 10..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Funding Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Tom Fallshaw, Eman Aleksic and Pauline Steele for assistance with DBS sample collection and viral load analysis. We are grateful to the Australian Centre for HIV and Hepatitis Virology (ACH2) and the Burnet Institute for assistance with funding.