Understanding Human Coronavirus HCoV-NL63

Abdul-Rasool, Sahar; Fielding, Burtram C

Due to its high specificity and sensitivity, reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and other nucleic acid tests are the preferred methods for diagnosis of coronavirus infections, such as SARS-CoV [15] . The majority of nucleic acid amplification tests is designed with the ORF1a/1b, which is genetically stable in coronaviruses, and the nucleocapsid (N) or spike (S) genes (Table 1) [25, 26, 28, 30, 45, 46, 64, 67, [71] [72] [73] . Based on in vitro coronavirus expression studies, the N gene has the theoretical advantage of being more abundant in infected cells and therefore of higher sensitivity for PCR assays, but this has not been clearly proven in clinical studies [74] . RT-PCR of nasopharyngeal samples, both frozen and fresh, is the most popular choice for detection of HCoV-NL63 ( Table 1 ) and viral culture is frequently used for confirmation of infection [67, 73] .