Herpes simplex virus and Alzheimer's disease: a search for virus DNA by spot hybridisation

A sensitive hybridisation screening technique (spot hybridisation) was used to search post-mortem brain DNA extracts for herpes simplex I virus sequences in non-neurological controls, Alzheimer's disease cases and Herpes simplex virus infected mice. A reconstruction experiment showed that 0.1 herpes genome equivalents per cell could be detected in 100 micrograms tissue extracts. Although herpes sequences were readily detected in infected mice, none of the human brains examined could be shown to contain such sequences.