Aptamer: The potential application to norovirus research, diagnosis, and therapeutics

Aptamer has been attracting much attention as a new biomolecular tool for viral diagnostic and therapeutic applications. Aptamer is a functional nucleic acid that folds into a unique three-dimensional conformation that binds to a specific target, which can be an alternative for antibodies. Rather, aptamer offers various advantages over antibodies as a target-specific recognition molecule: high affinity, specificity, and thermostability, low production cost, etc. Several studies have reported DNA aptamers for certain human norovirus strains as well as murine norovirus, which has enabled development and evaluation of aptasensor (aptamer-based biosensor) technology for rapid and sensitive norovirus detection. Therapeutic application of aptamer to inhibiting norovirus infections has not been clearly demonstrated to date, but there have been a few reports suggesting the potential of aptamer-based therapeutics. Taken together, it has been implied that aptamer is a new target-specific biomolecular tool that offers various potential applications to norovirus research, diagnosis, and therapeutics, which should contribute to the infection and disease control of norovirus by rapidly identifying potential infection routes and reducing the disease burden through therapeutic approach. Herein we summarize recent development and application of norovirus-specific aptamers and discuss future research directions towards better control of norovirus transmission/infections using this aptamer technology.