Single stranded 70-mer oligonucleotides with a C12 aminolink at the 5 0 end, with or without dInosines/ 5 0 -nitroindole/N wobbles, were obtained from Biomers.net (Ulm, Germany). The design of the probes was based on the programs BLASTn (16) , ClustalX (17) and ConSort ß (J.Blomberg et al., unpublished results). Briefly, matching viral sequences were retrieved from the GenBank database at NCBI, NIH, using the viral sequence of interest as a query, and alignments were performed by a BLASTn search. BLASTn and ClustalX alignments were analyzed in ConSort ß to define the most suitable probe sequence. ConSort ß provides the frequency of variation and the variation of nt composition in each base position, the number of aligned sequences, and a majority consensus sequence. The proposed probe sequence was further analyzed for its predicted Tm and probable homodimer and hairpin interactions using Mfold at the IDT OligoAnalyser site (http://eu.idtdna .com/analyzer/Applications/OligoAnalyzer/)