NUCLEIC-ACID PROBES ARE LIGANDS TOO - AN INTRODUCTION TO MOLECULAR PATHOLOGY

This paper serves as an introduction to the primary clinical laborator y tool of molecular medicine-molecular diagnostics, The many applicati ons of molecular diagnostics service all aspects of medicine, from gen etics to oncology and microbiology to genetic identification, Although probe and immunoassays share no substrate homologies, they do share n umerous functional homologies. How genetic information is stored and p assed onto successive generations is briefly reviewed because it is ke y to understanding how mutation causes cellular dysfunction and diseas e, The roots of molecular medicine go back more than 50 years with the pioneering work on sickle cell anemia by Linus Pauling and others, Ne vertheless, it is a very young science, and molecular diagnostics is e ven younger, It is important to keep in mind that nucleic acid probes are ligand assays too, and that our challenge is to perform the tasks that clinical chemists do so well, only with a new and different set o f reagents.