Сучасні підходи до індикації Bacillus anthracis у навколишньому середовищі

Abstract

Bacillus anthracis — the causative agent of anthrax, which can be used for bioterrorism purposes. An effective biosecurity strategy involves the improvement diagnostics tests for increase its sensitivity and specificity, and the tests for the rapid detection of pathogen. The literature review presents the results of recent methods of detecting Bacillus anthracis spores/cells in environmental objects with greatest epidemiological significance — in air and soil. Conventional microbiological methods are the gold standard for bacterial identification, but their limitation is necessity to cultivate and work with a live particularly dangerous pathogen — B. anthracis, which is associated with the risk of laboratory infection. Now, a number of new methods have been developed for the indication B. anthracis, which allow speed up the process of their detection and are much safer from the point of view of biosecurity. First of all, these are methods based on DNA amplification. Sequencing the DNA of the pathogen adds specificity to the method, and also identifies rare or new variants of B. anthracis. A rapid method for the identification of B. anthracis DNA, which takes less than an hour, has been developed. Also, immunological methods are used to determine the pathogen’s antigen. It should be noted that the specific identification of B. anthracis remains difficult due to its phenotypic and genotypic similarity to other Bacillus species. To solve this problem, a phage typing method was proposed, which has recently been improved with the help of biotechnological methods (construction of the B. anthracis phage) with the detection of its bioluminescence. A promising technology for fast, highly sensitive and specific detection and identification of B. anthracis is biosensor methods using portable devices for their implementation. Key words: anthrax, Bacillus аnthracis, environment, diagnostic tests.