Designing primers from multiple sequences using Matchup program to improve detection of hepatitis B virus by polymerase chain reaction.

Traditionally primers for PCR detection of viruses have been selected from genomic sequence of single or representative viral strain. However, high mutation rate of viral genomes often results in failure in detecting viruses in clinical and environmental samples. Thus, it seems necessary to consider primers designed from multiple viral sequences in order to improve detection of viral variants. Matchup is a program intended to select universal primers from multiple sequences. We designed using Matchup program primer pairs for HBV detection from 691 full genomic HBV DNA sequences available from NCBI GenBank database. Thousands of primer candidates were initially extracted and these were sequentially filtered down to 5 primer pairs. These primer pairs were tested by PCR using 5 HBV Korean HBsAg(+) patient sera, and eventually one universal primer pair was selected and named MUW (multiple-universal-worldwide). This primer pair, 3 HBV reference primer pairs reported by others and 1 commercial primer pair were compared using 86 HBV HBsAg(+) sera from Korean and Vietnamese patients. The detection rate for MUW primer pair was 72.1%, much greater than those obtained by reference and commercial primers (32.5 to 40.7%). The superiority of MUW primer pair appeared to be correlated with the conserved sequences of the forward primer binding sites and primer quality score. These results suggest that the universal primers designed by the Matchup program from multiple sequences could be useful in detecting viruses from clinical samples.