Development of a Nucleic Acid Detection System for Rapid Microbial Tests

摘要

Food safety is one of the most important issues for the food industry. Although the detection of microbial contamination is indispensable for the management of food hygiene, conventional cultural enrichment methods require from days to weeks to obtain results. Thus, there is an increasing need for rapid detection technology to shorten the examination time. We have developed signaling array technology for detecting nucleic acids with a sensing probe, which hybridizes with specific nucleic acids and emits fluorescence. This probe enables conventional DNA microarrays used for microbial tests to offer one-step detection of unlabeled nucleic acid fragments, thus simplifying the detection of microbes. This paper describes details of this signaling array technology and its applications.