Application of “Omics” Technologies for Diagnosis and Pathogenesis of Neurological Infections

Infections of the human nervous system have substantial morbidity and mortality but also represent among the most challenging of all neurological diseases because of the difficulty in establishing a diagnosis and implementing effective therapies. Neurological infections lead to altered expression levels of a wide range of host- and pathogen-derived biomolecules both within and outside of the nervous system. Quantitative analyses of these biomolecular perturbations have been traditionally performed using “classical” molecular or analytical methods, which evaluate one or few genes or their products at a time. Recent technical developments together with the increasing availability of high-throughput/content methodologies have enabled a more comprehensive overview of these molecular alterations and thus provide new approaches to the diagnosis and/or treatment of this group of disorders. Herein, we will review recent evidence pointing to the capacity of the so-called omics techniques in studying the nervous system infections with an emphasis on genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics technologies.