Why is a universal biosensor needed?

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Over 1400 organisms are pathogenic to humans. This number does not include threats to the food supply, organisms that are emerging threats, and organisms not yet created through bioengineering. Classical methods for identification of bacteria and viruses in samples from both the environment and from individuals have been slow and inadequate for broad identification purposes. Additionally, their results can be difficult to interpret.

Microorganism identification has traditionally relied on laborious culture-based and microscopy techniques.

Currently, most methods of detecting infectious agents use polymerase chain reaction or PCR to detect a known infectious agent. Because the specific sequence of the virus or bacteria has to be known in order for PCR to detect the infectious agent’s presence, it can only detect what is suspected in a sample.

Current DNA sequence-based systems are usually single gene PCR based tests. One must know the genomic sequence of the organism and must guess about the organism that may be present in the sample.

Emerging approaches for the identification of known infectious agents include multiplexed PCR methods which link together multiple single agent tests and microarray strategies. While these methods may provide broader ability to identify infectious agents, they will continue to be severely constrained because they can only identify infectious agents that are of known composition and suspected of being present in the sample. These methods can not identify variants of infectious agents that are mutated or bioengineered pathogens.