Biologie moléculaire et microbiologie clinique en 2007

Molecular biology is omnipresent in medical biology especially in microbiology. Many papers report studies on its importance in diagnosis, prognosis, therapeutic field, epidemiology, natural (or not) biological risks alike. The important sum of reports on this subject does not always bring an obvious answer to the part that molecular biology could play in a microbiology laboratory either public or private. This article summarizes the contributions of this specialized field in microbiology and brings some questions on its contribution. Is molecular biology a real progress in microbiology? What are the main indications of molecular biology today in this field? According to the infectious particle, the answers are not always simple. They can be obvious in some cases (for instance, hepatitis C) or less obvious in other cases (tuberculosis for instance). In the first part of this article, we reported general remarks in molecular biology related to microbiology. The second part report some important applications underlining the important extent of molecular biology in this field.