Lateral Flow Assay - A New Platform for Diagnosis of Livestock Disease

Abstract

The livestock sector of India contributes the largest livestock populations in the world and plays an important role in Indian economy. Many bacterial, viral, and fungal diseases impact a great loss to the production and productive potential of livestock’s of India, which currently, a major concern in both small and large ruminants. Proper differential diagnosis might play an elite role in prevention of these above mentioned diseases. Therefore the diagnosis should be very accurate, rapid and sensitive enough to confirm the occurrence of these diseases. Albeit various sophisticated diagnostic techniques like molecular, biochemical and microbiological are still existing however these techniques are mainly lab based method which requires highly sophisticated environment. Thus we should change our traditional diagnostic methods to a new concept for which it can be performed at pen side with low cost and high sensitivity. For this purpose, immuno-chromatographic based lateral flow assay may be the major concern intended to detect the presence (or absence) of a target analyte in sample without any need of sophisticated equipment. The lateral flow assay will provide a potential biological tool not only in diagnosis and control of emerging livestock diseases but also in detection of biological warfare agents. So this review article is a brief overview based on the salient aspects of this assay which could be extensively employed in the livestock sector.