Angarita MM, Torres CMI, Díaz TAK

Language: Spanish
References: 0
Page: 796-807
PDF size: 510.23 Kb.

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Epidemiology, from the etymological point of view, means "science that studies the diseases that affect the communities". It has been developing through centuries, describing and explaining the dynamics of population health; it has integrated new branches such as molecular epidemiology defined as a discipline in which molecular techniques are implemented for clinical, research, and scientific contributions.
Objective: To present techniques with basis in molecular biology, which have contributed to research development.
Material and methods: A review of scientific articles was made during the months of August- October of 2016, and July-September, 2017 in English, Portuguese, French, and Spanish languages, in scientific journals such as Pubmed, Scielo, Biomed Central, Free Medical Journals, LILACS, Redalyc, Inbiomed, and Dialnet, using DeCs term descriptors of Health Sciences, and the MeSH descriptor; articles published during the time period from 2012-2017 were used, and publications of previous years were also taken into consideration as a contribution to the history of this topic.
Results: 05 techniques of molecular biology which have contributed to research development were presented: PCR, sequencing, hybridization with DNA probes, RAPD, and RFLP.
Conclusions: At present, the use of molecular techniques allows the complete genome or short and long sequences of DNA with the aim of detecting and analyzing sequences of interest for research in agronomy and forensic sciences, clinical diagnosis and basic, translational, and applied research, each of them characterized by reliability and quickness in obtaining result, strength, specificity, sensitivity, and flexibility, compared to phenotypic methods.