At all times mankind strived for progressive changes, and for a long time has been looking for new ways to diagnose and treat diseases in order to prolong life. Scientists have constantly attempted to introduce the latest techniques, and if in the 20th century an understanding of the course of various processes at the cellular level was achieved, at the latest stage of development there is already a transition to the study of the molecular and even atomic composition of individual derivatives, which should contribute to the transition to a qualitatively new level of process understanding. The first to speak about nanotechnology was Richard Phillips Feynman, who back
in 1959 spoke about the possibility of controlling matter precisely at the atomic level. At the present stage, nanotechnology is increasingly being introduced into medical science, in particular, in the field of laboratory diagnostics of infectious diseases. More recently, this fact has received practical confirmation on the example of organizing large-scale testing of the population for the presence of the coronavirus infection. The methods used on the basis of atomic force molecular detectors provide a unique opportunity for visualization and identification of protein markers of
pathological processes and conditions with a sensitivity several orders of magnitude higher than that of standard laboratory studies. This principle was the basis for the implementation of the polymerase chain reaction method, the essence of which lies in the multiple multiplication of microscopic concentrations of pathogen DNA fragments in a patient’s biological sample under artificial conditions. As a result of a complex process called amplification, under the influence of enzymes and changes in temperature (from 50 to 95 °C), two DNA molecules are formed from one DNA molecule. In this case, there is a copying of a DNA section that is present only in that type of pathogenic microorganism that is of interest to a specialist at the moment. The cycle of formation
of a new DNA molecule takes about 3 minutes, while 30-40 cycles is quite enough to obtain the proper number of molecules required for reliable visual determination of the desired agent by electrophoresis.
The polymerase chain reaction and infectious diseases: hopes and realities
