A comparative study of three different nucleic acid amplification techniques combined with microchip electrophoresis for HPV16 E6/E7 mRNA detection

Research towards nucleic acid amplification technologies for detection of human papillomavirus (HPV) 16 E6/E7 mRNA was carried out in combination with microchip electrophoresis (MCE). The approaches of nucleic acid sequence based amplification (NASBA), one-step RT-PCR and two-step RT-PCR were successfully developed. NASBA was a simple enzymatic reaction, which directly amplified HPV16 mRNA by isothermal amplification, leaving out the complex and tedious operation. One-step RT-PCR simplified the amplification step, while two-step RT-PCR was more sensitive and less vulnerable to the interference. Furthermore, instead of gel electrophoresis, microchip electrophoresis (MCE) for RNA assay was employed to realize high-throughput and rapid analysis. Finally, the results show that PCR-based or NASBA-based mRNA tests are valuable for HPV mRNA assay, which can be potentially applied for clinical diagnosis and prognosis of cervical and other anogenital carcinoma.