Pan-filovirus one-step reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction screening assay

Five species within the genera Ebolavirus and Marburgvirus of the family Filoviridae are known to cause severe hemorrhagic fever with high mortality rates in humans and non-human primates. Recent large outbreaks of Ebola virus disease in West Africa (2014 - 2016) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (2018 - ongoing) have demonstrated the epidemic potential with devastating public health consequences. Several known and novel filovirus species have been found in bats in recent years. However, the role of each virus species in the disease ecology of human disease is still unclear. In particular, the transmission mechanism from potential animal hosts to humans is not known. Therefore, a simple, flexible, cost-effective screening tool for detecting the presence of any (putative) member of the filovirus family in animal samples is needed. In this study, a one-step conventional pan-filovirus RT-PCR assay was developed. The designed universal consensus primers of this screening test target two highly conserved regions of the nucleoprotein (NP) of all currently known filoviruses. The assay was capable of specific amplification of viral RNA of all six primate-pathogenic (human and non-human) filovirus species and resulted in 317 bp long RT-PCR products. This amplicon length renders the assay suitable for flexible application as conventional reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) as well as for future use as rapid real-time quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR).