Virus Diagnostics on Microarrays

Abstract

Whereas the majority of microarray applications still deal with expression analysis for gathering information about levels of gene products at certain cell states, other approaches simply ask the question whether particular genes, which are usually indicative for particular microorganisms and pathogens, are present in a sample or not. Investigations that are more detailed try to evaluate the presence of particular subtypes of a given pathogen. The combination of microarray technology and virus diagnostics promises to generate an ideal platform for fast, sensitive, specific, and parallelized virus diagnostics. Performing virus diagnostics on microarrays, however, requires other basic techniques to be optimized. This is necessary in order to obtain unambiguous and reproducible results, which are compatible with the needs for clinical routine. Parameters that have to be considered include supports, coupling chemistry, chemical oligonucleotide synthesis, signal enhancement strategies, and optimal coordination of PCR reactions, hybridizations, and signal detection, as well as interpretation strategies. Finally, considerations should be given to economic aspects, one chip-one patient strategies and low integrated arrays as a custom-tailored way to fast and accurate diagnostic tools.

A medical overview of encephalitis

“…As new pathogenic viruses are emerging all the time new assays will need to be developed to detect them. In order to try and improve the detection of the pathogenic viruses research is currently evaluating the use of microarrays which will be used to quantify the expression of particular viral genomes (Davis & Tyler, 2005;Striebel, Birch-Hirschfeld, Egerer, & Foldes-Papp, 2003).…”

Microarray technology in obstetrics and gynecology: A guide for clinicians

“…Viral gene chips recently identified that the cause for severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) was a novel coronavirus. [83][84][85] considerations drive the development of statistical methods to rest as much valid data as possible from a small number of microarrays. Nonetheless, on a per-test basis, microarrays offer relatively inexpensive, rapid, simple testing, compared with other molecular methods.…”

Detection of encephalic and hemorrhagic viruses: integration of micro- and nano-fabrication with computational tools

“…Since single nucleotide polymorphisms can destabilize the hybridization between the target virus and short probes (25-40 nucleotide long), it is possible to detect of different mutations in the viral genome, including those that cannot be revealed by sequencing. For this reason, and unlike conventional PCR methods, microarray technology is better suited for the fast, sensitive, specific, and parallelized diagnostics of heterogeneous populations and mixtures of different viral species and strains [19,20]. Several researchers have used microarrays for the genotyping of influenza viruses [19], herpex simplex [21], drug resistant HIV-1 [22] , [23], Syphilis [23], polioviruses [22], human papilloma [24], orthopoxviruses including variola, monkeypox, cowpox, and vaccinia [25], human group A rotaviruses [26], Baculoviruses [27], SARS [28,29], hepatitis B and C [30,31] , [23], African swine fever [24,32], Epstein-Barr virus [23], and hantaviruses [33].…”