Abstract

Nucleic acid aptamers are a promising platform for the development of a wide range of diagnostic and therapeutic agents and environmental monitoring tools. The properties of aptamers make it possible to consider them as synthetic analogs of antibodies. At the same time, aptamers have a number of important advantages over antibodies, which makes them an effective tool for the development of new-generation diagnostic tools that provide high sensitivity and specificity of detection with a high degree of reproducibility and controllability of properties and low production costs. In particular, technologies for the detection of biomolecules and whole microorganisms, created on the basis of aptamers, can be used to solve the problems of highly sensitive express diagnostics of bacterial pathogens. This review summarizes the achievements of aptamer technologies in the field of detection of bacterial pathogens and their components and discusses the prospects for their practical use