Monday, November 5, 2007

Detection of the HIV-1 K103N Resistance Mutation

Brian A. Lee, Michael T.W. Huang, Anubhav Tripathi, and Stephanie McCalla. Division of Engineering, Brown University, Box D, Providence, RI 02912

We designed 10 target sequences to cover a 242 K103N patient population, with the consensus sequence covering 76% of the population. Beacon structures for detecting these sequences were computationally optimized in Visual OMP and mFold. Experimental results show that the 3-stem consensus molecular beacon can rapidly (<5 minutes) detect the K103N mutation at a sensitivity of 2nM and 1.1% (p<0.02) in the presence of wild-type DNA at a reaction temperature of 45°C.