Contaminations contaminate common databases.

The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a very powerful method to detect and identify pathogens. The high sensitivity of the method, however, comes with a cost; any of the millions of artificial DNA copies generated by PCR can serve as a template in a following experiment. If not identified as contaminations, these may result in erroneous conclusions on the occurrence of the pathogen, thereby inflating estimates of host range and geographic distribution. In the present paper, we evaluate whether several published records of avian haemosporidian parasites, in either unusual host species or geographical regions, might stem from PCR contaminations rather than novel biological findings. The detailed descriptions of these cases are shedding light upon the steps in the work process that might lead to PCR contaminations. By increasing the awareness of this problem, it will aid in developing procedures that keep these to a minimum. The examples in the present paper are from haemosporidians of birds, however the problem of contaminations and suggested actions should apply generally to all kinds of PCR-based identifications, not just of parasites and pathogens.

A simple modification of PCR thermal profile applied to evade persisting contamination.

The polymerase chain reaction (PCR), one of the most commonly applied methods of diagnostics and molecular biology has a frustrating downside known as the false positive signal or contamination. Several solutions to avoid and to eliminate PCR contaminations have been worked out to date but the implementation of these solutions to laboratory practice may be laborious and time consuming. A simple approach to circumvent the problem of persisting PCR contamination is reported. The principle of this approach lies in shortening the steps of denaturation, annealing, and elongation in the PCR thermal cycle. The modification leads to the radical decline of false positive signals obtained for the no-template controls without affecting the detection of target PCR products. In the model experiments presented here, the signal of negative control was shifted by about ten cycles up above those for the examined samples so that it could be neglected. We do not recommend this solution in PCR diagnostics, where the sensitivity of detection is of the highest priority. However, the approach could be useful to pass by the problem of persisting contamination in quantitative PCR, where the range of quantitation is usually much above the limits of detection.

Extensive homologous recombination in classical swine fever virus: A re-evaluation of homologous recombination events in the strain AF407339.

In this short report, the genome-wide homologous recombination events were re-evaluated for classical swine fever virus (CSFV) strain AF407339. We challenged a previous study which suggested only one recombination event in AF407339 based on 25 CSFV genomes. Through our re-analysis on the 25 genomes in the previous study and the 41 genomes used in the present study, we argued that there should be possibly at least two clear recombination events happening in AF407339 through genome-wide scanning. The reasons for identifying only one recombination event in the previous study might be due to the limited number of available CSFV genome sequences at that time and the limited usage of detection methods. In contrast, as identified by most detection methods using all available CSFV genome sequences, two major recombination events were found at the starting and ending zones of the genome AF407339, respectively. The first one has two parents AF333000 (minor) and AY554397 (major) with beginning and ending breakpoints located at 19 and 607 nt of the genome respectively. The second one has two parents AF531433 (minor) and GQ902941 (major) with beginning and ending breakpoints at 8397 and 11,078 nt of the genome respectively. Phylogenetic incongruence analysis using neighbor-joining algorithm with 1000 bootstrapping replicates further supported the existence of these two recombination events. In addition, we also identified additional 18 recombination events on the available CSFV strains. Some of them may be trivial and can be ignored. In conclusion, CSFV might have relatively high frequency of homologous recombination events. Genome-wide scanning of identifying recombination events should utilize multiple detection methods so as to reduce the risk of misidentification.