Virulent highly divergent vaccine-derived polioviruses circulating.

2003 OCT 8 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Researchers have found evidence of the circulation of virulent highly divergent vaccine-derived polioviruses.

According to a study from the United States and Russia, "Two approaches based on hybridization of viral probes with oligonucleotide microarrays were developed for rapid analysis of genetic variations during microevolution of RNA viruses. Microarray analysis of viral recombination and microarray for resequencing and heterogeneity analysis were able to generate instant genetic maps of vaccine-derived polioviruses (VDPVs) and reveal the degree of their evolutionary divergence."

"Unlike conventional methods based on cDNA sequencing and restriction fragment length polymorphism, the microarray approaches are better suited for analysis of heterogeneous populations and mixtures of different strains," said Elena Cherkasova and collaborators at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Moscow State University, and the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences. "The microarray hybridization profile is very sensitive to the cumulative presence of small quantities of different mutations, including those that cannot be revealed by sequencing, making this approach useful for characterization of profiles of nucleotide sequence diversity in viral populations."

"By using these methods, we identified a type-3 VDPV isolated from a healthy person and missed by conventional methods of ...