Advances in Animal Disease Diagnosis

Advances in Animal Disease Diagnosis: Infectious animal diseases caused by pathogenic microorganisms such as bacteria, fungi, and viruses threaten the health and well-being of wildlife, livestock and human populations, limit productivity and significantly increase economic losses to each sector. Pathogen de-tection is an important step for the diagnosis and successful treatment of animal diseases as well as control management in farm and field conditions. The conventional techniques employed to diagnose pathogens in livestock species are time-consuming and sometimes give inconclusive results. On the contrary, molecular techniques have the potential to diag-nose known pathogens/conditions quickly, reliably, and unequivocally as well as for novel pathogen detection. New advances in diagnostics and vaccine design using genomics have developed powerful new methods that have also set the stage for the enhanced diagnosis, surveillance, and control of infectious diseases. High-throughput sequencing (HTS), for ex-ample, uses the latest DNA sequencing platforms in the detection, identification, and detailed analysis of both pathogen and host genomes. This book will explore some key opportunities in the context of animal health, such as the detection of new microorganisms and the development of improved diagnosis of emerging or re-emerging diseases and other clinical conditions, viz. biosensors, nanotools, and omics technologies.