Question

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Discuss in detail one potential benefit to industry, commerce, or society that is afforded through the implementation of aptamer technology.

Answer 1

Aptamers are short and single-stranded DNA, RNA molecules that can be developed with high affinity and specificity to interact with any desired target and bind to targets with high affinity and specificity by folding into tertiary structures. Although they just bind like antibodies, they have a number of advantages, such as shorter generation time, lower costs of manufacturing, higher modifiability and better thermal stability.

Aptamers are mainly used in clinical diagnostics and therapeutic agents.

Role of aptamer in as therapeutic agent-

The development of hybridoma technology for generating monoclonal antibodies, led to the development of a many novel antibody drugs. For example- trastuzumab targeting receptor, tyrosine-protein kinase two which is implicated in ovarian and breast tumors.

Anti-CD20 chimeric mAb rituximab, developed for treating B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma, which is more common than the other general type of lymphoma and it is the cancer that originates in lymphatic system.

Role of aptamer in Pathogen recognition-

A fluorescence resonance energy transfer aptamers were developed as a screening tool for Escherichia coli outer membrane proteins to detect enterotoxaemia E. coli (a condition induced by the absorption of large volumes of toxins produced by E-coli)

In addition to using purified bacterial proteins as targets, the whole bacterium-based SELEX (Systematic Evolution of Ligands by Exponential Enrichment, “a standard method of generating aptamers, where the target of interest is first incubated with a pool of single-stranded random DNA or RNA.) procedure was applied to detect E. coli, Lactobacillus, Staphylococcus aureus, the virulent strain of Mycobacterium etc.

SELEX-based technique can be used to generate molecular probes for detecting viral infections, such as herpes virus, influenza virus and HIV. Furthermore, SELEX has been used successfully to generate aptamers for the detection of a number of parasites, like Cryptosporidium parvum, Entamoeba histolytica.

Role of aptamer in cancer recognition- Aptamer are very important in fast and reliable diagnostic of cancer and have been developed for the detection of a number of cancer-related biomarkers, including multiple tumor-related proteins in living cancer cells, such as MUC1 (a cell surface associated, also called polymorphic epithelial mucin or epithelial membrane antige is a mucin encoded by the MUC1 gene in humans), HER2 (human epidermal growth factor receptor 2), and estrogen receptor . Aptamers have been successfully used for the detection of a number of tumor-related soluble biomarkers, including prostate specific antigen. Aptamers for the detection of the MCF-7 (is a breast cancer cell line isolated in 1970) breast cancer cells also developed.