PURPOSE OF REVIEW Allergy to hen's egg is common in infancy and childhood. Oral food challenges are often required to diagnose egg allergy, because of the limitation in the diagnostic accuracy of skin test and specific IgE to egg white. New molecular diagnostic technologies have been recently introduced into allergological research. In this article, we will review the recent literature regardin...

Entecavir (ETV) is a potent nucleoside analogue against hepatitis B virus (HBV). Because of development of ETV resistance requires at least three amino acid substitutions in HBV polymerase (pol) gene, emergence of ETV resistance is rare (~1%) in nucleoside-naive patients after up to 5 years of treatment. However, it has been suggested that lamivudine (LAM) therapy can preselect for HBV variants...

The detection of Pneumocystis DNA in clinical specimens by using PCR assays is leading to important advances in Pneumocystis pneumonia (PcP) clinical diagnosis, therapy and epidemiology. Highly sensitive and specific PCR tools improved the clinical diagnosis of PcP allowing an accurate, early diagnosis of Pneumocystis infection, which should lead to a decreased duration from onset of symptoms t...

The development of different molecular biology techniques in the past decade has led to an explosion of new research in molecular pathology with consequent important applications to diagnosis, prognosis, and therapeutics, as well as a clearer concept of the disease pathogenesis. Many methods used in molecular pathology are now validated and used in several areas of pathological diagnosis, parti...

BACKGROUND/AIMS Alpers syndrome is a developmental mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome leading to fatal brain and liver disease in children and young adults. Mutations in the gene for the mitochondrial DNA polymerase (POLG) have recently been shown to cause this disorder. METHODS The POLG locus was sequenced in 15 sequential probands diagnosed with Alpers syndrome. In addition, the POLG muta...

Makkouk, K.M. and S.G. Kumari. 2006. Molecular Diagnosis of Plant Viruses. Arab J. Pl. Prot. 24: 135-138. Proper virus identification is always the key in developing appropriate practical solutions to manage plant virus diseases. Recent advances in biotechnology and molecular biology have played a significant role in the development of rapid, specific and sensitive diagnostic tests. The use of ...

nanotechnology is the engineering of functional systems at the molecular scale which may exert a revolutionary impact on cancer diagnosis and therapy. nanotechnology is being applied to cancer in two broad areas: i) the development of nanovectors such as nanoparticles which can be loaded with drugs or imaging agents and then targeted to tumours, and ii) high-throughput nanosensor devices for de...

Genetic variation within nuclear and mitochondrial DNA of Meloidogyne species and host races has been evaluated for the development of root-knot nematode molecular diagnostics. This review summarizes the distinctive features of several useful DNA-based assays for plant-parasitic nematodes, focusing upon the direct application of these procedures for Meloidogyne detection, identification, and sy...

NC Med J March/April 2007, Volume 68, Number 2 uring the past 10 to 15 years, we have seen expansive growth of the use of molecular technology in the clinical laboratory for diagnosing infectious diseases. As a result, many laboratories are able to offer more sensitive testing, faster turnaround times, and ultimately improved patient care. The gold standard in bacteriology largely remains cultu...

The importance of the interaction between basic science and clinical practice has long been known but it has become even more evident in the past few decades with the impressive rate of development in the field of molecular genetics. This short article reviews molecular diagnosis of two different diseases for which scientific progress has immediately been translated into a dramatic improvement ...