RAPID, OPTICAL NUCLEIC ACID PROBES FOR HIV DNA AND RNA

描述（改编自申请人摘要）：发展

DESCRIPTION (Adapted from applicant's abstract): The development of diverse nucleic probes is generating excitement because of their potential as diagnostic reagents. These tools promise to enhance the diagnosis of infectious diseases, genetic disorders, malignancies, and cancer. However, the extension of laboratory breakthroughs to routine clinical diagnostics has produced great disappointment. The reasons for the failure of the transition of these probes from the laboratory to the clinic are threefold: inadequate sensitivity, inadequate specificity, and inconvenience associated with the lack of user-friendly systems to monitor these probes. The proposal is to develop a multi-analyze nucleic acid probe system for the detection of HIV DNA and RNA that solves these problems using surface plasmon resonance (SPR). Because this detection technique is direct, without complex hybridization protocols, it promises to provide rapid screening of target analytes with minimal skill requirements. The benefit of the proposed system lies not solely in its sensitive detection of nucleic acid hybridization, but also in its ability to solve the problems plaguing SPR biosensors in general: these include inadequate specificity and inconvenience. Because of this, the proposed system also may significantly impact the immunodiagnostics community, where SPR sensing techniques have been under investigation for several years.