An Easy Operating Pathogen Microarray (EOPM) Platform for Rapid Screening of Vertebrate Pathogens

An Easy Operating Pathogen Microarray (EOPM) was designed to detect almost all known pathogens and related species based on their genomic sequences. For effective identification of pathogens from EOPM data, a statistical enrichment algorithm has been proposed and further implemented in a user-friendly interface. A microarray was designed with probes for vertebrate-infecting virus sequences in EMBL, 18S rRNA fungi and parasite sequences from EMBL, and 16S rRNA sequences of bacteria from RDP, synthesized on the Agilent platform. The array was tested using 2 color dyes on cultured microbes and on clinical samples from sick and healthy people, looking for differences in clinically ill people compared to a number of healthy "controls".