NASBA: A Method for Nucleic Acid Diagnostics

Nucleic acid sequence-based amplification (NASBA) is a primer dependent, homogeneous, isothermal amplification process for the detection of RNA (1 ). It can result in 10⁹ - fold amplification of a specific RNA sequence and offers the unique possibility to amplify RNA in a background of genomic DNA. Detection of RNA can be used to monitor gene expression or cell viability or can be a prognostic indication for virus replication and production. Amplification of RNA beyond the detection limit is easily achieved because of the often high copy numbers of RNA targets in a cell. NASBA already has been used for the detection of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) (2 –11 ) hepatitis C virus (HCV) (12 ,13 ) and cytomegalovirus (CMV).