Clinical performance of non-radioactive assays for HIV-1 DNA amplified by the polymerase chain reaction.

A major factor preventing more widespread use of polymerase chain reaction in the clinical laboratory is the lack of convenient non-radioactive probe hybridization procedures which do not sacrifice sensitivity or specificity. In this report, we describe comparisons of probes labelled with biotin, digoxygenin, alkaline phosphatase, and32P. We report the comparison of solution or liquid hybridization assay and Southern blotting with digoxygenin-labelled oligonucleotides on a total of 64 clinical specimens. Perfect diagnostic agreement between the32P and digoxygenin probes was obtained. These data suggest that the non-radioactive assay as described is as sensitive and as specific as the assay with32P-Iabelled probes.