ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Cell. Infect. Microbiol.
Sec. Clinical Infectious Diseases
This article is part of the Research TopicDevelopment and Application of New Diagnostic Methods in Clinical Diagnosis of Virus-Related DiseasesView all 11 articles
Polyethylene Glycol Modified LAMP Assay Enables Sensitive and Specific Clinical Detection of Varicella-Zoster Virus
Provisionally accepted
- 1Shaanxi Provincial People's Hospital, Xi'An, China
- 2Naval Medical University, Shanghai, China
- 3Jiangxi Cancer Hospital, Nanchang, China
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Abstract Accurate, timely diagnosis of varicella–zoster virus (VZV) is important for treatment and infection control. While loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) is operationally simple, nonspecific priming can degrade performance. We assessed a polyethylene glycol– modified LAMP (PEG-LAMP) that tunes the reaction microenvironment via macromolecular crowding. PEG (1 μL per reaction) was titrated across concentrations; 100 mM was selected as the optimized condition because negatives remained at baseline while target amplification kinetics were maintained. PEG-LAMP preserved a log–linear relation between threshold time and input and improved the detection limit from 103 to 102 copies/μL compared with conventional LAMP. Precision at a fixed input exhibited low variability, and specificity was supported by flat traces in non-target reactions. In a 30-sample panel (15 spiked positives, 15 negatives) tested in parallel by PCR, conventional LAMP, and PEG-LAMP, PEG-LAMP was fully concordant with PCR and yielded shorter time-to-threshold for positives, whereas conventional LAMP produced one false negative and four false positives. Taken together, the results demonstrate that microenvironmental tuning with PEG provides a low-complexity means to suppress nonspecific LAMP while preserving on-target amplification, yielding a lower detection limit and faster time-to-result with PCR-level qualitative agreement in clinical VZV diagnosis.
Keywords: varicella-zoster virus, diagnosis, Molecular diagnosis, LAMP assay, infectious disease
Received: 05 Oct 2025; Accepted: 24 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhang, Tian, Fang, Xu, Lv and Yang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Lei Zhang
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