Biological Warfare Agents and their Detection and Monitoring Techniques (Review Paper)

Abstract

Recently, threat from biological warfare agents (BWAs) has emerged as the foremost national and global security challenge because of their simple and cheap production, easy dispersal, complicated detection, expensive protection and psychological, economical and social impact. Early detection and identification of BWAs during intentional biological event is essential to initiate corrective emergency responses for management of such incidents. Efforts are being made across the globe for development of state of the art technologies and systems for detection and identification of BWAs. However, till date there is no single system which can detect all the bio-threat agents. In the present review, we describe the currently available techniques and systems for detection and identification of these agents. The basic identification techniques including biological culture, immunological methods, nucleic acid based detection, MALDI-TOF MS, cellular fatty acid profiling and flow cytometry based detection are presented. Detection of BWAs with bio-sensors, surface plasmon resonance, biological detectors, and stand-off detection systems is also summarized. However, despite of availability of several techniques and tools, no full proof system is available for detection/identification of all the BWAs.

A Rapid Flow through Membrane Enzyme Linked Immunosorbent Assay for Bacillus anthracis using Surface Array Protein as a Biomarker

“…There are several serodiagnostic assays for anthrax infection in humans [22][23][24][25] . However, sophisticated tools and techniques are required for its detection from the environmental or clinical samples 20,26,27 . Sap is considered an important biomarker of B. anthracis 19 .…”

Advances in Molecular Diagnostic Approaches for Biothreat Agents

“…ELISA is the most widely used method detecting enzyme-linked antigen-antibody complexes on a solid phase. The technique is user-friendly, sensitive, specific, and cost-effective [14]. The method quantifies the antigen/antibody complexes in a given sample and is used as an in-vitro diagnostic tool in clinical laboratories.…”

“…A label-free assay detects the presence of an analyte directly through a transducer that can be an optical, electrical or mechanical [26]. In contrast, labeled assays use a second detector coupled with an enzyme, fluorophore or radioisotope to detect an analyte [14,[27][28][29].…”

Enhanced production and purification of recombinant surface array protein (Sap) for use in detection of Bacillus anthracis

“…There are several serodiagnostic assays for anthrax infection in humans (Ghosh and Goel 2012;Ghosh et al 2013bGhosh et al , c, 2015. However, detection of B. anthracis directly from environmental or clinical samples requires sophisticated techniques (Ghosh et al 2013a;Goel et al 2005;Pal et al 2016). Therefore, it is important to develop a simple and reliable detection method for B. anthracis.…”