PCR based rapid diagnosis of pathogens

Abstract

Use of PCR assisted diagnosis has many advantages over the conventional methods. Since PCR can amplify oven a single strand of DNA into millions of copies within hours, even a single bacterial cell collected from the infected fish could be used directly for the identification. Thus considerable time can be saved. Two of the PCR assisted diagnostic techniques merits special mention. They are the DNA fingerprinting based an arbitrarily primed PCR (AP PCR) and amplification of species specific virulence gene using specific primers flanking these genes. Before going to the details of these techniques let us examine how the PCR work