The environmental route of transmission is important for many protozoan and helminth parasites, with water, soil and food being particularly significant. Both the potential for producing large numbers of transmissive stages and their environmental robustness pose persistent threats to public and veterinary health. The introduction of molecular techniques, in particular those based on the amplif...

BACKGROUND The real-time monitoring of polynucleotide amplification is at the core of most molecular assays. This conventionally relies on fluorescent detection of the amplicon produced, requiring complex and costly hardware, often restricting it to specialised laboratories. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Here we report the first real-time, closed-tube luminescent reporter system for nucleic acid amplifi...

A novel enzyme-free signal amplification-based assay for highly sensitive in situ fluorescence imaging and detection of intracellular telomerase activity was developed by using a gold nanoflare probe-triggered mimic-hybridization chain reaction (mimic-HCR) coupled with a graphene oxide (GO) surface-anchored fluorescence signal readout pathway. The nanoflare probe consists of gold nanoparticles ...

We have developed a hepatitis B virus (HBV) DNA detection and quantification system based on amplification with nucleic acid sequence-based amplification (NASBA) technology and real-time detection with molecular beacon technology. NASBA is normally applied to amplify single-stranded target RNA, producing RNA amplicons. In this work we show that with modifications like primer design, sample extr...

Nucleic acid amplification is a powerful molecular biology tool, although its use outside the modern laboratory environment is limited due to the relatively cumbersome methods required to extract nucleic acids from biological samples. To address this issue, we investigated a variety of materials for their suitability for nucleic acid capture and purification. We report here that untreated cellu...

A cascade CRISPR/cas nucleic acid diagnostic system, which can achieve high-sensitive and single-base specificity without target amplification, was developed for miRNA detection.