Aptamers for the Diagnosis of Infectious Diseases

Nowadays, infectious diseases have been considered as life-threatening concerns worldwide. Traditional methods based on clinical features and epidemiological information have been successfully applied in infection diagnosis. However, these methods are either relatively complicated or time-consuming. Aptamer, a specific DNA/RNA binder, can serve as field-deployable sensors (termed aptasensors), and is thus highly promising to construct point-of-use tools for infection diagnosis. In this chapter, we will present the basic features of most prevalent infectious diseases and the efforts to obtain aptamers against their pathogen counterparts. Then, we will discuss the design strategies and working principles of typical aptasensors, nanomaterial-involved aptasensors, and microfluidics-integrated aptasensors for typical infectious diseases such as cholera, tuberculosis, anthrax, malaria, viral hepatitis, AIDS and COVID-19, as well as their application for infectious diseases profiling and cellular monitoring. It can be anticipated that aptamers will play a pivotal role in the future development of advanced diagnostic techniques of intricate infectious diseases.