Perspective of Molecular Diagnosis in Healthcare: From Barcode to Pattern Recognition.

Barcode technology has a broad spectrum of applications including healthcare, food security, and environmental monitoring, due to its ability to encode large amounts of information. With the rapid development of modern molecular research, barcodes are utilized as a reporter with different molecular combinations to label many biomolecular targets, including genomic and metabolic elements, even with multiplex targeting. Along with the advancements in barcoded bioassay, the improvements of various designs of barcode components, encoding and decoding strategies, and their portable adoption are indispensable in satisfying multiple purposes, such as medical confirmation and point-of-care (POC) testing. This perspective briefly discusses the current direction and progress of barcodes development and provides a hypothesis for barcoded bioassay in the near future.