MOLECULAR PATHOLOGY: AN ADVANCED APPROACH FOR RAPID DIAGNOSIS OF DISEASES

In the recent times, we have witnessed some of the major outbreaks of various diseases in human beings and animals and the ultimate conclusion drawn is, the traditional diagnostic tools and techniques are not up to the mark at all particularly for a rapid diagnosis. Hence, there is a need of dynamic techniques with a wide spectrum of applications such as early disease diagnosis and characterization, genomic studies, early prediction of the outbreaks and novel drug development etc.The molecular diagnostic techniques are providing major break throughs in the above- mentioned fields of the medical and veterinary sciences. The advent of PCR has provided the pathologists a tool for the rapid disease diagnosis than the traditional techniques of isolation and culturing of the pathogens. Since, its introduction PCR has been a handy tool for the mass level screening of the pathogens (such as Influenza virus, Pox virus, FMD virus, and PPR virus) responsible for the major outbreaks across the world. Blotting techniques, the pivotal techniques of the hybridization techniques are based on a simple principle of immobilization of biological moieties such as DNA, RNA and proteins on a solid support system. But these techniques have a wide range of applications such as documentation of the mutations, screening of food samples for the potential threats of public health and detection of the bacteria which are difficult to culture.Microarray techniques basically traces its evolution from the blotting techniques. It is simply based on the collection of microscopic units/moieties of targeted sequences (DNA, RNA, Oligonucleotides) called as Probes. The introduction of theses assays has enabled scientists to document information in the various fields such as toxicogenomics, forensics, oncology, disease diagnosis and most importantly early prediction of the outbreaks.The introduction of the Next Generation Sequencing techniques has enabled the pathologists for a rapid and accurate documentation of the whole genome sequences of almost all the organisms. These techniques have applications in almost all the fields of veterinary and medical sciences ranging from genomics to epidemiology such as identification of the new strains of pathogens, study of patterns of evolution and transmission of various pathogens during outbreaks, early prediction of outbreaks, study of mutations and the study of drug resistance. Proteomics is the most recent addition to the molecular diagnostic techniques it is basically the study and characterization of the proteomes on a large scale. It finds its utility in the various aspects of the veterinary sciences such as drug development, finding of the molecular targets for the various drugs and vaccines, vaccine preparation, study of the pathogenesis and transmission of various viruses and bacteria and the investigation of the transmission of various parasites etc. The advent of molecular diagnostic techniques has dramatically enhanced the capacities of the researchers, scientists and pathologists to document the genomes of almost all organisms rapidly, predict the transmission patterns of the diseases, take early measures to counter outbreaks, identify specified molecular targets for the new drugs and the methods to overcome increasing issues of drug resistance. These high-throughput techniques are therefore, paving way for the detailed analytical studies of host-pathogen interaction at genomics, transcriptomics as well as proteomics levels results of which are also utilized by the policy planners to formulate the prevention and control strategies and ultimately save the country from severe economic and other losses due to morbidity and mortality in population.