Emerging Technologies in Nanotechnology-Based Pathogen Detection

Nanotechnology-based pathogen detection is an emerging technology that is poised to have a major impact on health care and medicine, food and agriculture, the environment, and biodefense. The technology bridges a variety of sciences, including biology, chemistry, physics, and statistics to create a new cadre of tools and capabilities that can be applied to basic and translational research, diagnostics, and commercialization. This burgeoning field has created an unprecedented array of technologies that have advanced detection, diagnosis, and imaging of chemical and biological agents and that offers the potential to facilitate detection of biomarkers of disease pathogenesis. This review provides a summary of the more prominent areas of nanotechnology-based pathogen detection.