The development of PCR assay for diagnosis of Helicobacter pylori in saliva samples

Abstract

Helicobacter pylori (Hp) is a common bacterium in human gastric mucosa. More than 50% of the world's population has Hp bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract; 10-20% of them is at risk of stomach infections; and 1-2% is at risk of stomach cancer. Currently, there are many methods of  Hp diagnosis, in which CLOtest on gastric biopsy tissue samples is a frequently-used clinical method with high accuracy, but it requires a process of intracellular invasion. In this study, we have successfully developed a process to diagnose Hp in saliva samples using PCR method through identifying two specific genes ureC and hsp60 of Hp. After designing primer pairs for two genes and optimising PCR reactions, we conducted a test on 67 saliva samples, and the results showed that this process gave similar results with PCR method on the gastric biopsy tissue samples and the clinical method CLOtest.