A Comparative Study of the Fluorescence Melting Curve Assay with Direct Immunofluorescence Assay and Monoplex Real-Time PCR for Simultaneous Detection of Nine Respiratory Viruses

To explore the clinical significance of nine common respiratory viruses detected by a fluorescence melting curve analysis (FMCA) assay, four hundred and seventeen archived respiratory specimens from pediatric patients were tested in parallel using the FMCA assay and direct immunofluorescence assay (DFA). The detection performance between the two methods were compared. The results of monoplex real-time PCR (monoplex RT-PCR) were used as references. Totally, 162 (38.85%) samples were found to be positive by FMCA, while 76 (18.22%) samples were found to be positive by DFA, and the positive rate of monoplex real-time PCR was 41.73%. The FMCA assay had a significantly higher sensitivity than that of DFA. Furthermore, the result analysis showed that the comparison of the FMCA with monoplex RT-PCR detection resulted in high sensitivity and specificity values. The FMCA assay may have great potential for routine diagnosis of respiratory virus infection in clinics across China with relatively high sensitivity and specificity and low cost.