Evaluation of propidium monoazide–based qPCR to detect viable oocysts of Toxoplasma gondii

Information on the viability of Toxoplasma gondii oocysts is crucial to establish the public health significance of this environmental transmission stage that can contaminate water and foods. Interest for molecular-based methods to assess viability is growing and the aim of our study was to assess, for the first time, a propidium monoazide (PMA)–qPCR approach to determine the viability of T. gondii oocysts. Untreated and heat-killed (99 °C, 5 min) oocysts were incubated with PMA, a photoreactive DNA binding dye, and analyzed by confocal microscopy and flow cytometry to characterize oocysts’ dye permeability. Different PMA concentrations (50 to 150 μM), incubation temperatures (22, 37, and 45 °C), amplicon length, selected targeted gene, and dyes (PMA, PMAxx™) were evaluated to define optimal conditions to discriminate specifically viable oocysts by PMA–qPCR. In theory, PMA binding to DNA would inhibit PCR amplification in dead but not in viable oocysts. Incubation at 22 °C with 100 μM PMA coupled to qPCR targeting a 123-bp sequence of the 529-bp repeat element allowed the distinction between viable and heated oocysts. However, the reduction of viability following heating of oocysts at high temperature was slight and, contrarily to reverse transcriptase-qPCR, the qPCR signal was not totally suppressed in heated suspensions. Therefore, PMA–qPCR is able to assess the impact of heating on T. gondii oocysts’ viability but underestimates the efficacy of this treatment. The relevance of this technique to evaluate the efficacy of other inactivation processes and assess exposure of humans to this pathogen requires further investigations.