Molecular beacon approach

Fan and colleagues used an electrochemical version of the molecular beacon approach to detect DNA hybridization by measuring the electrochemical signal that accompanied a conformational change in the sensor. Their... 

Fig. 3 Molecular beacon approach for examining the permeability of thin films. A molecular beacon is immobilized in a porous template and the layers are assembled on the surface. The particles are incubated with DNA of different length sequences and the permeation of the DNA through the film is measured by an increase in the fluorescence of the particles. Reprinted with permission from the Journal of the American Chemical Society [55]...

Paillard D, McKain N, Rincon MT, Shingfield KJ, Givens DI, Wallace RJ (2007) Quantification of ruminal Clostridium proteoclasticum by real-time PCR using a molecular beacon approach. J Appl Microbiol 103 1251-1261... 

Usnally a nncleic acid probe that emits a signal only when bound to a specific target. An example is a molecular beacon. See Stohr, K., Hafner, B., Nolle., O. et al.. Species-specific identification of mycobacterial 16S rRNA PCR amplicons nsing smart probes. Anal. Chem. 77, 7195-7203, 2005. There are other examples of smart probes inclnding proteins (Wunder, A., Tung, C.-H., Mtiller-Ladner, U., Weissleder, R., and Mahmood, U., In vivo imaging of protease activity in arthritis, a novel approach for monitoring treatment response, Arthritis Rheumatism 50, 2459-2465, 2004) and chiral compounds (Tsukube, H. and Shinoda, S., Lanthanide complexes as smart... 

Molecular Beacons A New Approach for Detecting Salmonella Species... 

Molecular beacons are oligonucleotide probes that become fluorescent upon hybridization. We developed a new approach to detect the presence of Salmonella species using these fluorogenic reporter molecules and demonstrated their ability to discriminate between similar E. coli species in real-time PCR assays. A detection limit of 1 CPU per PCR reaction was obtained. The assays were carried out entirely in sealed PCR tubes, enabling fast and direct detection in semiautomated format. 

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