REVIEW ARTICLE
A Membrane-Based Flow-through Hybridization Technology: A Rapid and Versatile tool for Molecular Diagnostics
K.F.J. Chow*
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2008Volume: 2
First Page: 22
Last Page: 28
Publisher ID: TOBIOTJ-2-22
DOI: 10.2174/1874070700802010022
Article History:
Received Date: 30/08/2007Revision Received Date: 29/11/2007
Acceptance Date: 29/11/2007
Electronic publication date: 31/1/2008
Collection year: 2008
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Genetic diseases remain an important cause of ailment, morbidity and death for children and adults. Despite the recent advances of tools for molecular diagnosis such as DNA chips and protein arrays which are capable of analyzing many genes, SNPs and proteins, few of these systems have been applied in clinical diagnosis because the apparatus are still expensive and many of the genetic tests are less likely to be developed commercially. Hence most genetic tests are still being performed through conventional methods such as Dot-Blot hybridization and Slot-blot hybridization in clinical laboratories worldwide. The expensive, time consuming and labor-intensive nature of these tests make them unaffordable for popular use. The availability of a low-cost diagnostic system will make molecular testing cost efficient and become readily available worldwide. In this report, we evaluated the Flow-through hybridization system. Our results show that Flow-through hybridization method produces higher sensitivity in 5 to 15 minutes compared to those obtained through conventional hybridization in hours to overnight respectively without sacrificing specificity. An apparatus can also be readily adopted for membrane-based home-brew tests, R&D development as well as other commercially available diagnostic kits, hence making the Flow-through method a useful tool for molecular diagnosis.