Diagnostic molecular microbiology in posterior uveitis: Principles and applications

One of the most exciting medical applications of molecular genetics is in the diagnosis of infectious diseases. Novel nucleic acid technologies and an ever-increasing arsenal of nucleic acid probes and sequence data are accumulating at breakneck speed and enabling identification of a wide range of infectious agents in patients. This avalanche of new molecular diagnostic possibilities presents a challenge to the clinician attempting to select the most accurate molecular genetic test for maximal benefit to the patient. It therefore seemed timely to include in this volume on posterior uveitis a chapter that would focus on molecular biological and genetic methods for diagnosis of infectious diseases causing posterior uveitis. Our goal in writing this chapter was to make the principles of molecular genetics comprehensible to clinicians so that they could understand how this information can be used to genotype microorganisms for disease diagnosis and management. In the first part of this chapter, we discuss some of the basic principles of molecular genetics and, in the second part, we describe molecular diagnostic tests useful in identifying microorganisms associated with posterior uveitis.