Detection of human papillomavirus types 45 and 51 by type-specific polymerase chain reaction

Human papillomavirus (HPV) types 45 and 51 are both considered as high risk types for the development of human cervical cancer. To optimize the detection of these two types in clinical samples, HPV-45 and HPV-51 specific primers were designed to amplify respectively a 141 bp and a 266 bp fragment from the L1 gene by polymerase chain reaction (PCR). The sensitivity and the specificity of these two PCR reactions were determined using varying amounts of HPV DNA containing plasmids and negative and positive controls. Overall, the sensitivity for the HPV-45 plasmid DNA is 10 fg, while for HPV-51 the sensitivity is 1 fg. This is equivalent to approximately 100 and 10 HPV genome copies per PCR reaction, respectively.