Speaker
Prof.
Fred Kramer
(Public Health Research Institute)
Description
Molecular beacons are hairpin-shaped oligonucleotide probes
that undergo a fluorogenic conformational change upon
binding to PCR amplicons. They can be labeled with
differently colored fluorophores, enabling multiplex assays
to be carried out in sealed reaction tubes. They can be
designed to be “finicky”, so that they only bind to
amplicons from a single species, or they can be designed to
be “sloppy”, so that they bind to amplicons from many
different species. The set of melting temperatures obtained
from the probe-target hybrids that are formed with a limited
set of differently colored, sloppy molecular beacon probes
uniquely identifies which bacterial species is present in a
clinical sample (from a list of more than a hundred
species). Alternatively, the unique set of colors that
appear in a screening assay containing as many as 35
combinatorially color-coded, finicky molecular beacon probes
identifies the infectious agent. The use of molecular
beacons in digital PCR formats will enable many different
targets in a single clinical sample to be simultaneously
identified and quantitated.
