Full Description

The total number of known bacteria, eukaryotes, and viruses that pose a threat to human health ismore than one hundred. At least half of these are relevant to water and food safety. Their control inwater has been most economically achieved through the use of indicator organisms and treatmenttechnologies. To regulate individual microorganisms, if and when necessary, tools to prioritize theabove list of microorganisms with respect to their potential to cause harm must be available.Evaluation and establishment of virulence-factor activity relationships (VFARs) has been suggestedas one approach to accomplish this prioritization. VFARs can be defined as a set of relationships(expected and to be established) between distinguishing informational and functional molecules andthe corresponding virulent activity of microorganisms- modulated by environmental and host-relatedfactors. Evaluation of the existence and extent of such relationships requires dedicated informationaldatabases and high throughput experimental tools (e.g., DNA biochips). We are evaluating a pilotscaledatabase for this purpose focusing on selected examples of bacteria, eukaryotes, and viruses.We are also evaluating the design and fabrication of a VFAR biochip to be validated for waterbornepathogens. The work presented here summarizes the main characteristics of this database. It alsodiscusses the issues related to the development of the VFAR biochip including probe design,specificity, sensitivity, detection limit, target amplification, reliability, and sample processing. Theinformation gained through the development of this database and the biochip may be used indesigning microarrays to detect hundreds to thousands of virulence factors irrespective of the hostmicroorganisms.

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Edition: Vol. - No. Published: 06/17/2004 Number of Pages: 20File Size: 1 file , 840 KB