Discrimination of infectious and heat-treated norovirus by combining platinum compounds and real-time RT-PCR.

Human noroviruses (NoV) are major agents of foodborne outbreaks. Because of the lack of a standardized cell culture method, real-time reverse transcriptase PCR is now commonly used for the detection of NoV in foodstuffs and environmental samples. However, this approach detects the viral nucleic acids of both infectious and non-infectious viruses and needs to be optimized to predict infectivity for public health risk assessment. The aim of this study was to develop a viability PCR method to discriminate between native and heat-treated virus, for both NoV and its surrogate, murine norovirus (MNV). To this end, screening of viability markers (monoazide dyes, platinum and palladium compounds) was performed on viral RNA, native virus or heat-treated virus, and incubation conditions were optimized with PtCl4, the most efficient viability marker. Multiple MNV molecular models were designed: no impact of amplicon length was observed on inactivated MNV genomic titer; but the 5'NTR, ORF1 and 3'UTR regions resulted in higher reductions than central genomic regions. The optimal viability PCR conditions developed (incubation with 2.5 mM PtCl4 in PBS for 10 min at 5 °C) were finally applied to MNV by performing heat inactivation studies and to native and heat-treated NoV clinical strains. The viability PCR discriminated efficiently between native and heat-inactivated MNV at 72 °C and 80 °C, and efficiently reduced the genomic titer of heat-treated NoV strains. This viability PCR method could be useful to study heat inactivation kinetics of NoV and MNV. It could also be evaluated for the identification of infectious enteric viruses in foodstuffs and environmental samples.