Detection and Identification of Common Food-Borne Viruses with a Tiling Microarray

Chen, Haifeng; Mammel, Mark; Kulka, Mike; Patel, Isha; Jackson, Scott; Goswami, Biswendu B.

To guarantee the accuracy of identification by the tiling array, our approach involves the design of multiple oligonucleotide probes having similar specificities for the same target. This strategy offers possibilities to compensate for the lack of specificity on the single probe level. Viruses representing on the microarray were readily detected and identified by specific hybridization to the appropriate oligonucleotide probe sets, even within the same virus genus. The cross-hybridization of some CXKV strains to a limited number of oligo probes from a different strain marked areas of extensive sequence homology, when the sequence of different strains were aligned (data not shown). The specificity of the assay is exemplified by the fact that there was never any crosshybridization detected between CXKV, HAV and norovirus probes to the non-target sequences.