Sequence conservation of the region targeted by the Abbott RealTime HCV viral load assay

The Abbott RealTime (RT) HCV assay targets the 5' untranslated region (UTR) of the HCV genome. Here, we analyzed the sequence variability of the assay target regions from 1,092 specimens. Thermodynamic modeling of the percentage of primers/probes bound at the assay annealing temperature was performed to assess the potential effect of sequence variability. An analysis of this large data set revealed that the primer and probe binding sites of the RealTime HCV viral load assay are highly conserved and that naturally occurring sequence polymorphisms are not expected to discernibly impact assay performance.