Comparison of the Luminex xTAG Respiratory Viral Panel Fast v2 Assay With Anyplex II RV16 Detection Kit and AdvanSure RV Real-Time RT-PCR Assay for the Detection of Respiratory Viruses

Ko, Dae-Hyun; Kim, Hyun Soo; Hyun, Jungwon; Kim, Han-Sung; Kim, Jae-Seok; Park, Kyoung Un; Song, Wonkeun

Luminex technology has been widely adopted in clinical laboratories for various tests such as multiplex PCR, human leukocyte antigen tests, and protein assays [10, 11] . The Luminex xTAG respiratory viral panel (RVP) and RVP FAST v1 assays (Luminex Molecular Diagnostics, Toronto, Canada) proved to be clinically useful in previous studies [12] [13] [14] [15] , and a revised version (xTAG RVP Fast v2) (Luminex Molecular Diagnostics) was recently released in 2013. The Luminex xTAG RVP Fast v2 assay is a multiplex reverse transcriptase (RT)-PCR assay that is incorporated with the Luminex tagging system. Following the first release of the Luminex xTAG RVP assay, Luminex Molecular Diagnostics issued a revised version. The new assay have several advantages over the other assays: 1) detect more types of viruses (19 strains); 2) distinguish among influenza A subtypes (H1, H3, 2009 H1N1), coronavirus HKU1, and parainfluenza type 4; 3) handle the largest number of specimens in one run (94 specimens); 4) use a small specimen volume (10 μL of nucleic acids); and 5) produce semi-quantitative results as the fluorescence intensity.