Advancements in the Worldwide Detection of Severe Fever with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome Virus Infection from 2009 to 2023

Severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTS) is a growing concern as an emerging tick-borne infectious disease originating from the SFTS virus (SFTSV), a recent addition to the Phlebovirus genus under the family of bunyaviruses. SFTS is typically identified by symptoms such as fever, thrombocytopenia, leukopenia, and gastrointestinal problems, accompanied by a potentially high case fatality rate. Thus, early and accurate diagnosis is essential for effective treatment and disease management. This review delves into the existing methodologies for SFTS detection, including pathogenic, molecular, and immunological technologies.

Recent Advances on Peptide-Based Biosensors and Electronic Noses for Foodborne Pathogen Detection

Foodborne pathogens present a serious issue around the world due to the remarkably high number of illnesses they cause every year. In an effort to narrow the gap between monitoring needs and currently implemented classical detection methodologies, the last decades have seen an increased development of highly accurate and reliable biosensors. Peptides as recognition biomolecules have been explored to develop biosensors that combine simple sample preparation and enhanced detection of bacterial pathogens in food. This review first focuses on the selection strategies for the design and screening of sensitive peptide bioreceptors, such as the isolation of natural antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) from living organisms, the screening of peptides by phage display and the use of in silico tools. Subsequently, an overview on the state-of-the-art techniques in the development of peptide-based biosensors for foodborne pathogen detection based on various transduction systems was given. Additionally, limitations in classical detection strategies have led to the development of innovative approaches for food monitoring, such as electronic noses, as promising alternatives. The use of peptide receptors in electronic noses is a growing field and the recent advances of such systems for foodborne pathogen detection are presented. All these biosensors and electronic noses are promising alternatives for the pathogen detection with high sensitivity, low cost and rapid response, and some of them are potential portable devices for on-site analyses.

Evaluation of the metagenomic next-generation sequencing performance in pathogenic detection in patients with spinal infection

Spinal infection is a rarely occurred pathology, whose diagnosis remains a major challenge due to the low sensitivity of culturing techniques. Metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) is a novel approach to identify the pathogenic organisms in infectious diseases. In this study, mNGS technology was adopted for pathogenic detection in spinal infection from the tissue and pus samples. Additionally, the diagnostic performance of mNGS for spinal infection was evaluated, by comparing it with that of the conventional microbial culture, with the histopathological results as the gold standard. Overall, 56 samples from 38 patients were enrolled for mNGS testing, and 69 samples were included for microbial culture. 30 patients (78.95%) were identified to be positive by the mNGS method, which was higher than that of microbial culture (17, 44.74%). The sensitivity and specificity of mNGS with pus samples were 84.2% and 100.0%, respectively, which outperformed those of microbial culture (42.1% and 100.0%). The pathogen identification results were applied to medication guidance, and all 38 patients experienced favorable outcomes at three months, followed-up post-treatment, without any adverse effects. These findings proved that mNGS was superior to microbial culture in pathogenic identification of the spinal infection, thereby showing great promise in guiding drug administration and improving clinical outcomes.

Gold nanoparticles-mediated fluorescent chemical nose sensor for pathogenic diagnosis and phenotype

Pathogens are one of the important factors affecting national economic construction. An ideal detection system for pathogen control with excellent sensitivity, high specificity, and time-saving is needed. Here, we reported a method for bacterial detection using gold nanoparticles-mediated fluorescent "chemical nose" sensors (GFCEs). The technique consists of gold nanoparticles-coated magnetic particle using benzaldehyde, octyl aldehyde, and pyrimidine-4-formaldehyde modified, respectively. And these positively charged nanocompound interacting with three different fluorescent proteins (FPs) to form three kinds of GFCEs, respectively, named GFCE1, GFCE2, and GFCE3. Upon binding with pathogenic cells, functionalized gold nanoparticles could identify patches on hydrophobic/functional surfaces of microorganisms, and self-assemble with living bacteria by complementary electrostatic interactions. The binding ability between GFCEs and bacteria determines the change of fluorescence response of three FPs from GFCEs. These feature fluorescent level are pathogen-specific, highly repeatable, and can be analyzed by Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). The combination of GFCE1 and GFCE2 has the best performance when detecting pathogens with concentrations of 10⁶  cfu mL^-1 . The first discriminant within 15 minutes is 93.8%, which could be used for subsequent identification of unknown samples. The commonly applicable system provides a simple way for the rapid bacterial detection without preprocessing procedures.

Application of Molecular Beacons in Real-Time PCR

Real-time PCR or quantitative PCR (QPCR) is a powerful technique that allows measurement of PCR product while the amplification reaction proceeds. It incorporates the fluorescent element into conventional PCR as the calculation standard to provide a quantitative result. In this sense, fluorescent chemistry is the key component in QPCR. Till now, two types of fluorescent chemistries have been adopted in the QPCR systems: one is nonspecific probe and the other is specific. As a brilliant invention by Kramer et al. in 1996, molecular beacon is naturally suited as the reporting element in real-time PCR and has been adapted for many molecular biology applications. In this chapter, we briefly introduce the working principle of QPCR and overview different fluorescent chemistries, and then we focus on the applications of molecular beacons-like gene expression study, single-nucleotide polymorphisms and mutation detection, and pathogenic detection.