Rapid detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) is a critical step in controlling tuberculosis (TB). In this study, we used IS6110 as the specific identification target to develop a novel hybridization signal amplification method (HSAM) for the rapid and direct detection of MTBC from clinical sputum specimens. This system consists of magnetic bead-linked capture probes for target isolation, dextranbased nanoparticles for amplifying the reporter molecule (biotinylated-FITC), and detection probes (2B-DNA) for binding the nanoparticles. Both the capture and detection probes were specific to the IS6110 target sequence. Our results determined that as few as 10 copies of the IS6110 sequence or 10 M. tuberculosis bacteria could be detected,... |