ABSTRACT
Over the last two decades, few areas have witnessed changes of the magnitude observed in molecular biology in general and DNA/RNA analysis in particular (Burke et al., 1997). This progress has been catalyzed by the discoveries of techniques for synthesis, analysis, and manipulation of nucleic acids. Genetic tests and assays have an enormous scope of applications in biotechnology and medicine, ranging from agriculture and farming (Buitkamp and Epplen, 1996) to the detection of pathogens in foods (Feng, 1997), to genetic diagnostics on human subjects (Reiss, 1991). The benefits of this progress include the commercial availability of improved drugs produced by genetic engineering and new techniques for diagnosis of genetic diseases. Currently more than 400 diseases are diagnosable by molecular analysis of nucleic acids, and many more assays will undoubtedly follow in the near future as more genetic information is made available by major research undertakings such as the Human Genome Project (Olson, 1993).
