Abstract

Polymerase chain reaction played a significant role in amplifying nucleic acid or gene of interest which later became a routine diagnostic procedure due to its detection sensitivity and reproducibility. Despite the merits, its application could not reach low-resource laboratory settings or on-site detection and remained within the walls of sophisticated laboratories. This necessitates the need to have a simple, sensitive and rapid assays that can be applied in low-resource laboratory settings and even applied for on-site detection. The novel isothermal assays are breaking the conventional laboratory boundaries by amplifying the desired gene at a constant temperature in a shorter period. Recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA) is one of the fastest developing isothermal assays which is rapid, sensitive, specific and can be adopted in low resource settings. The article emphasizes on basic principle of RPA, its application across diverse fields and future lines of work for its improvement.