%0 Journal Article
%T Evaluation of the sensitivity of a measles diagnostic real-time RT-PCR assay incorporating recently observed priming mismatch variants, 2024.
%A Beck AS
%A Lopareva EN
%A Hwang H
%A Hart D
%A de Almeida M
%A Anderson R
%A Rota PA
%A Bankamp B
%J Euro Surveill
%V 29
%N 28
%D 2024 Jul
%M 38994600
%F 21.286
%R 10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2024.29.28.2400410
%X We investigated a variant of measles virus that encodes three mismatches to the reverse priming site for a widely used diagnostic real-time RT-PCR assay; reduction of sensitivity was hypothesised. We examined performance of the assay in context of the variant using in silico data, synthetic RNA templates and clinical specimens. Sensitivity was reduced observed at low copy numbers for templates encoding the variant sequence. We designed and tested an alternate priming strategy, rescuing the sensitivity of the assay.