Rapid Advances in Nucleic Acid Technologies for Detection and Diagnostics of Pathogens

Abstract

In this area of detection and diagnostics, traditional culture-based methods are simple to use, relatively inexpensive but too time consuming for high-throughput testing and too complex for analysis of samples with a mixture of organisms and provide little clinical information regarding the pathogen such as antibiotic resistance genes, virulence factors or strain subtypes.Nucleic Acid based technologies such as polymerase chain reaction, DNA microarrays, and high throughput automated sequencing methods have advantages over these culture based technologies which provides more molecular information as discussed above.In the last 10years, there is rapid advancement in these nucleic acid based technologies and in this review article; I will describe the current state of the art in the nucleic acid technologies for detection and diagnostics and future trends and advances in the field.