LETHBRIDGE – A technology still in its infancy is helping researchers to more quickly diagnose disease.
Known as DNA microarray technology, it is used at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency laboratory near Lethbridge to better understand pathogens such as foot-and-mouth disease and avian influenza.
“It used to take a month to serotype foot-and-mouth disease virus. We can do it in 24 hours now,” said Stacy Tessaro, head of the virology and quality control unit at the laboratory.
There are 24 known strains of foot-and-mouth worldwide. In the event of an outbreak, it is critical that officials know which form of the disease is present because vaccines are specific to each type.
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“We suspect if a terrorist were to introduce foot-and-mouth, they would try to introduce multiple strains,” he said.
“Having a test that can be done in 24 hours would give us a big jump on controlling the disease if it were to occur here.”
The international scientific community is watching the work.
“The world reference lab in the United Kingdom has asked us to collaborate with them in typing and the U.S. military has now asked to collaborate with us. They are going to go to Russia and collect all the Russian isolates of foot-and-mouth and they want to use our technology to type them,” Tessaro said.
Led by researcher Mohit Baxi, this technology is also being used for faster diagnostic methods for avian influenza and hog cholera, also known as classical swine fever.
Microarrays allow scientists to quickly analyze genes in a single experiment.
A microarray works by exploiting the ability of a given RNA molecule to bind to the DNA template from which it originated. The genetic material is stained with a florescent tag and when the slide has been scanned, a colour-coded computerized readout is provided.
By using an array containing many DNA samples, scientists can see in a single experiment the expression of hundreds or thousands of genes within a cell by measuring the amount of RNA bound to each site on the array.
Since microarrays contain a large of number of genes, they are useful to survey a large number of genes quickly or when the sample to be studied is small. Microarrays may be used to compare gene expression in two different cell types or in healthy and diseased tissue.
