Development and Evaluation of a Loop-Mediated Isothermal Amplification Method for Rapid Detection of Aspergillus fumigatus

Aspergillus fumigatusis a conditional pathogen and the major cause of life-threatening invasive aspergillosis (IA) in immunocompromised patients. The early and rapid detection ofA. fumigatusinfection is still a major challenge. In this study, the new member of the fungal annexin family, annexin C4, was chosen as the target to design a loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) assay for the rapid, specific, and sensitive detection ofA. fumigatus The evaluation of the specificity of the LAMP assay that was developed showed that no false-positive results were observed for the 22 non-A. fumigatusstrains, including 5 species of theAspergillusgenus. Its detection limit was approximately 10 copies per reaction in reference plasmids, with higher sensitivity than that of real-time quantitative PCR (qPCR) at 10(2)copies for the same target. Clinical samples from a total of 69 patients with probable IA (n =14) and possible IA (n= 55) were subjected to the LAMP assay, and positive results were found for the 14 patients with probable IA (100%) and 34 patients with possible IA (61.82%). When detection using the LAMP assay was compared with that using qPCR in the 69 clinical samples, the LAMP assay demonstrated a sensitivity of 89.19% and the concordance rate for the two methods was 72.46%. Accordingly, we report that a valuable LAMP assay for the rapid, specific, and simple detection ofA. fumigatusin clinical testing has been developed.