The Protein Man's Blog | A Discussion of Protein Research

Molecular biology based diagnostics are gaining wide importance for detecting diseases. Molecular diagnostic kits are simple and can either be used by a professional healthcare personnel or by the patient at home. Point of care diagnosis is gaining importance as it is easy to use in remote places by individuals with less or no experience without the need of sophisticated equipment. This method is based on techniques like PCR, in situ hybridization, ELISA, etc., that detect biomarkers specific for that particular disease. Lateral flow assay is one of the point of care techniques used to detect human, animal and plant diseases, food testing or soil testing. Usually liquid samples like blood, urine, serum, milk etc., are suitable for testing by this method but solid sample like tissues, soil, food etc., can also be tested by mixing the samples in suitable buffers.

In in-vivo systems, the cells have mechanical support in extracellular vicinity that not only provides overall stability but also facilitates cell-cell interaction, adhesion, cell proliferation, migration and differentiation. This mechanical support is a complex functional bioactive scaffold called the Extracellular matrix (ECM).

Loop mediated isothermal Amplification (LAMP) technique is one of the recent PCR techniques that is gaining importance for its application in molecular diagnostics. LAMP is a single tube PCR reaction carried out at constant temperature. LAMP is simple, affordable, cost effective, requires simple machinery and can be used in remote places by persons with little training.

There has been an exponential interest developing from past few years for studying the translational regulation of different genes in many model systems. Protein synthesis is the functional and fundamental biological process essential for decoding the genetic information and culminates it with a specific phenotype. Since the energy expenditure on protein synthesis is roughly more than half of the total energy expense of the cell during rapid growth, thus studying the kinetics of translational instrumentation has gained a broad attraction recently. As it has been shown previously, even a subtle altercation in translational apparatus can substantially affect human health. Hence, it is essential to profile the actively translating proteins comprehensively in order to develop insights into the cumulative translatome and its functional correlations.