Biosensors: Modern Tools for Disease Diagnosis and Animal Health Monitoring

Tewari, Anuj; Jain, Beenu; Brar, Basanti; Prasad, Gaya; Prasad, Minakshi

Animals play a vital role in our lives as they provide milk, meat, and other by-products for daily consumption. At the same time, their health directly/indirectly affects human beings as we both share a common environment. The One Health concept makes it imperative that the animals should remain healthy as it will have an impact on our health as well as economy. Animal disease diagnosis, their health monitoring, prevention, and control of diseases are important from this aspect. Tools for rapid diagnosis of animal diseases are crucial for early diagnosis and imposing control measures. Molecular techniques such as, genome sequencing, restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP), DNA microarray, PCR, and real-time PCR are some of the rapid techniques, but they need expertise and sophisticated labs. Conventional methods such as isolation of the pathogen, serological techniques, are laborious and time taking process. Therefore, to overcome the said limitations of conventional and molecular tools, biosensors are the better alternatives as they are rapid and can be used as pen-side diagnostic tests. They can provide test results in a few minutes under field conditions. In this chapter, we give an elaborative description of various types of biosensors and their utility in animal disease diagnostics and health monitoring.