Comparison of polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE), immuno-electron microscopy (IEM) and enzyme immunoassay (EIA) for the rapid diagnosis of rotavirus infection in children.

Detection of rotavirus RNA by polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE) proved to be a highly sensitive and rapid diagnostic test. A comparison of this assay with immuno-electron microscopy (IEM) and enzyme immunoassay (EIA) in 245 faeces from children with gastroenteritis revealed complete agreement between the three assays in 238 (97.14%) samples. Among 75 samples positive in at least one of the three assays, negative results were observed in 5 (6.48%) by PAGE, in 6 (6.76%) by EIA and in none by IEM. Silver staining greatly increased the sensitivity of the PAGE assay. We conclude that although IEM remains the most sensitive and rapid rotavirus diagnostic assay, the PAGE technique has many advantages in its favour, including the non-requirement of expensive equipment, the use of only chemically defined reagents and the capacity to distinguish virus subgroup and variants and to detect non-crossreactive rotaviruses which are missed in serological assays.