A One-Step Method for Detecting and Typing Human Papillomavirus DNA in Cervical Scrape Specimens from Women with Cervical Dysplasia

We studied 66 women with a previous dysplastic cervical cytological smear who were re-ferred for colposcopy and biopsy for the presence of human papillomavirus (HPV) types 6, 11, 16, 18, and 31 DNA in cervical specimens. The specimens were analyzed by a novel hybridization method termed reverse blotting, in which cellular DNA is radiolabeled and used to probe a battery of cloned HPV DNAs immobilized on nitrocellulose. Reconstruc-tion experiments demonstrated that this method could detect about one HPV genome equivalent per cell. HPV DNA sequences were detected in 52 (960/0) of 54 patients who showed either condylomatous changes or dysplasia by cervical biopsy. HPV-16 was most commonly detected overall and was detected in 61 % of moderate or severe dysplastic sam-ples. HPV DNA was also detected in seven of 12 cervical scrapes from women with a history of dysplasia but with either normal or inflammatory changes noted on cervical biopsy. Our results indicate that the reverse-blot method can detect DNA homologous to various HPV types in a single experiment using DNA from the small numbers of cells obtained by cervical scraping. Largely because of the classic prospective study b