Selection and evaluation of an efficient method for the recovery of viral nucleic acids from complex biologicals

There is a need for a broad and efficient testing strategy for the detection of both known and novel viral adventitious agents in vaccines and biologicals. High-throughput sequencing (HTS) is an approach for such testing; however, an optimized testing method is one with a sample-processing pipeline that can help detect any viral adventitious agent that may be present. In this study, 11 commercial methods were assessed for efficient extraction of nucleic acids from a panel of viruses. An extraction strategy with two parallel arms, consisting of both the Invitrogen PureLink™ Virus RNA/DNA kit for total nucleic acid extraction and the Wako DNA Extractor(®) kit with an RNase A digestion for enrichment of double-stranded nucleic acid, was selected as the strategy for the extraction of all viral nucleic acid types (ssRNA, dsRNA, and dsDNA). Downstream processes, such as double-strand DNA synthesis and whole-genome amplification (WGA), were also assessed for the retrieval of viral sequences. Double-stranded DNA synthesis yielded larger numbers of viral reads, whereas WGA exhibited a strong bias toward amplification of double-stranded DNA, including host cellular DNA. The final sample-processing strategy consisted of the dual extraction approach followed by double-stranded DNA synthesis, which yielded a viral population with increased detection of some viruses by 8600-fold. Here we describe an efficient extraction procedure to support viral adventitious agent detection in cell substrates used for biological products using HTS.