Detection of Enteroviruses from Clinical Specimens

Enteroviruses are positive stranded RNA viruses belonging to the genus Enterovirus of the Picornaviridae family. Human enteroviruses are transmitted through the fecal–oral route and have been shown to cause mild to life-threatening diseases. Various diagnostic methods have been developed to detect enteroviruses from clinical specimens but many were impeded by requirements for special reagents, lengthy procedures, low sensitivity or cross-reactivity. This chapter describes rapid and highly sensitive methods of enteroviral detection directly from clinical specimens based on a conventional one-step Reverse Transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and a one-step real-time RT-PCR.