Patent ID: 6846621

Claim:
A method for detecting the presence of an enterovirus in a sample comprising the steps of: (i) purifying RNA contained in the sample; (ii) reverse transcribing the RNA with primers effective to reverse transcribe enteroviral RNA to provide a cDNA; (iii) contacting at least a portion of the cDNA with (a) a composition that promotes amplification of a nucleic acid and (b) an oligonucleotide mixture wherein the mixture comprises at least one oligonucleotide that hybridizes to a highly conserved sequence of the sense strand of an enterovirus nucleic acid and at least one oligonucleotide that hybridizes to a highly conserved sequence of the antisense strand of an enterovirus nucleic acid, wherein said mixture comprises SEQ ID NO:19; (iv) carrying out an amplification procedure on the amplification mixture such that, if an enterovirus is present in the sample, an enterovirus amplicon is produced whose sequence comprises a nucleotide sequence of at least a portion of the VP1 gene of the enterovirus genome; and (v) detecting whether an amplicon is present; wherein the presence of the amplicon indicates that an enterovirus is present in the sample.