WIKIMEDIA, ROY PERRYEarlier this year, researchers from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and colleagues published data in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on a newly identified virus, called NIH-CQV, which was present in serum from Chinese patients with seronegative hepatitis. They reported that NIH-CQV was related to parvoviruses and circoviruses with “remarkable genetic heterogeneity within patients,” but it was unclear whether it had any role in the etiology of the patients’ disease.
Skip ahead to last week, and another group—this one based in the United States—reported in the Journal of Virology that this same virus popped up in a number of clinical samples as part of a similar study looking at seronegative hepatitis. Again, the samples were nearly identical to one another in DNA and amino acid sequence, as well as to NIH-CQV. Given that the virus was present in all of the pooled samples, however, the researchers suspected contamination.
Retesting the individual samples, this time using a different technique to extract the nucleic acid, the team no longer found any evidence of the virus. After doing a bit of detective work, the researchers figured out that Qiagen spin columns used for extraction appeared to be the ...
