Aptamers overview: selection, features and applications.

ABSTRACT

Apatamer technology has been around for a quarter of a century and the field had matured enough to start seeing real applications, especially in the medical field. Since their discovery, aptamers rapidly emerged as key players in many fields, such as diagnostics, drug discovery, food science, drug delivery and therapeutics. Because of their synthetic nature, aptamers are evolving at an exponential rate gaining from the newest advances in chemistry, nanotechnology, biology and medicine. This review is meant to give an overview of the aptamer field, by including general aspects of aptamer identification and applications as well as highlighting certain features that contribute to their quick deployment in the biomedical field.