This grant is being supported from 1996 to 2000. This is a newly funded grant.
Results are preliminary and have yet been published.
This grant is being supported from 1992 to 1999. An attractive strategy for detecting rare infectious agents is to link a single-stranded oligonucleotide probe to a replicatable RNA that can be amplified exponentially after hybridization. The resulting recombinant RNAs hybridize to nucleic acid targets as do ordinary probes, and the probe-target hybrids that they form are separated from nonhybridized probes as in ordinary sandwich hybridization assays. As many as one billion copies of each replicatable probe can be synthesized in a single 30-minute incubation. The large number of copies that are synthesized can then be quantified by the incorporation of radioactive nucleotides or by the fluorescence of intercalating dyes.