实验基础

Diarrheagenic Escherichia coli strains are important causes of diarrhea in children from the developing world and are now being recognized as emerging enteropathogens in the developed world. Current methods of detection are too expensive and labor-intensive for routine detecti ...

The presence of Escherichia coli has long been established as the most reliable microbiological indication of fecal contamination in water. Current recommended culture-based methods for assessing water quality by the detection of E. coli are lengthy and lack ubiquity (ability to det ...

Nucleic acids are the ultimate biomarker and real-time PCR (qPCR) is firmly established as the method of choice for nucleic acid detection. Together, they allow the accurate, sensitive and specific identification of pathogens, and the use of qPCR has become routine in diagnostic laborator ...

Helicobacter pylori is an important pathogen whose primary niche is the human stomach. H. pylori is etiologically associated with gastric inflammation (gastritis), peptic ulcer disease, and gastric cancer. Both noninvasive (e.g., urea breath and stool antigen tests) and invasive (ga ...

Loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) is an established nucleic acid amplification method offering rapid, accurate, and cost-effective diagnosis of infectious diseases. From the beginning of DNA extraction to final detection of Campylobacter jejuni and Campylob ...

Rapid diagnosis of leptospirosis, through culture and/or serology, can be difficult without proper expertise and is often delayed due to the length of time required to obtain results. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR), more specifically the real-time detection of the amplified PCR produ ...

Clostridium difficile is known to cause antibiotic-associated diarrhea and pseudomembranous colitis. Toxinogenic strains of the bacterium produce toxins A (TcdA) and B (TcdB), which are associated with the pathogenicity. The standard methods for diagnosis of C. difficile infec ...

Molecular diagnostics is an increasing popular approach for the direct detection and identification of pathogenic bacteria in clinical samples. Conventional culture techniques are time-consuming and therefore causing a delay in the diagnosis of the patient. Alternative tec ...

Despite considerable advances in the safety of blood components based on the application of highly sensitive and specific screening methods to minimize the viral infection risk, the prevention of transfusion-associated bacterial infection remains a major challenge in transfu ...

The control and prevention of meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a major challenge for healthcare establishments, especially as this pathogen continues to evolve. The emergence and spread of community associated MRSA producing Panton–Valentine leukoc ...

The detection of Haemophilus influenzae by conventional methods like culture is time-consuming and may give false-negative results, especially during ongoing antibiotic treatment. Therefore, non-culture based methods that are sensitive, specific, and rapid are valuable for ...

The accurate diagnosis of lower respiratory tract infection remains a challenge, with conventional diagnostic methods often failing to identify a causative agent. Here we describe a multiplex real-time PCR assay that has been validated for the detection of the rarely identified atyp ...

Bordetella pertussis causes an upper respiratory infection in infants, adolescents, and adults. Diagnosis of pertussis, a vaccine-preventable disease, can be difficult, but recent implementation of real-time PCR assays in laboratories has hastened the ability of clinicians to m ...

Mycobacterium ulcerans is a slow-growing environmental bacterium that causes a severe skin disease known as Buruli ulcer. Rapid detection of M. ulcerans in clinical specimens is essential to ensure early diagnosis and prevention of disability. This chapter describes a real-time PCR m ...

Our aim was to develop and evaluate sensitive methods that would allow simultaneous direct identification of multiple potential pathogens in clinical specimens for diagnosis and epidemiological studies, using a multiplex PCR-based reverse line blot assay. We have previously de ...

Bartonella henselae is the causative agent of cat-scratch disease (CSD), usually presenting itself as a �self-limiting lymphadenopathy. In this chapter an internally controlled Taqman probe-based real-time PCR targeting the groEL gene of Bartonella spp. is described. This assay a ...

Mycoplasma pneumoniae is a significant cause of respiratory disease, accounting for approximately 20% of cases of community-acquired pneumonia. Although several diagnostic methods exist to detect M. pneumoniae in respiratory specimens, real-time PCR has emerged as a signific ...

Pneumocystis jirovecii is a common cause of life-threatening pneumonia among immunocompromised patients. Since P. jirovecii cannot be cultured, specific identification of it depends on examining respiratory specimens. In the last decade, PCR has been developed which allows the d ...

Recent advances in molecular biology and better understanding of the genetic basis of drug resistance have allowed rapid identification of mycobacteria and rapid detection of drug resistance of Mycobacterium tuberculosis present in cultured isolates or in respiratory specim ...

Systems biologists frequently seek to integrate complex data sets of diverse analytes into a comprehensive picture of an organism’s biological state under defined environmental conditions. Although one would prefer to collect these data from the same sample, technical limitati ...