Advances of molecular biology techniques in rapid bacterial identification

Sepsis is one of the most important causes of death in critically ill children.The leading cause of sepsis is bacterial infection.The early diagnosis of bacterial infection allows initiation of appropriate antimicrobial therapy that strongly correlates with positive outcomes.At present, the methods of detection and identification of bacteria in our country are still at the level of blood culture and biochemistry, and they have the weakness of time-consuming process and lower positive rate.Therefore, it is very important to establish a rapid and sensitive diagnostic method for early diagnosis of bacterial infection.In recent years, with the rapid development of molecular detection technology, some new molecular biological technologies can not only improve the detection accuracy and sensitivity, but also reduce the detection hours and expand the detection pathogen spectrum.Nowadays, they have been applied to bacteria classification and identification.There are two kinds of molecular biological technology that are applied at present.One is based on nucleic acid detective technology, such as nucleic acid amplification, DNA sequencing, gene chips, etc.The other is based on proteome technologies, such as biological mass spectrometry.In this paper, the application of recent molecular biological techniques in the rapid detection of bacteria is reviewed. Key words: Molecular biology; Rapid bacterial identification