Microarray-Based Microbial Identification and Characterization
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abstract
The development of molecular-based methodologies over the past two decades has dramatically improved our ability to detect microorganisms in clinical and environmental samples-enabling detection and identification within hours in many cases. However, most of these methods are only capable of monitoring individual or small groups of organisms at a time. Due to the extreme microbial diversity in many environments, such as the human intestine (Eckburg et al., 2005), it is necessary to monitor hundreds to thousands of different microbial populations simultaneously in order to detect all of the organisms of interest as a whole and understand these communities more comprehensively. Microarrays have the unprecedented potential to achieve this objective as specific, sensitive, quantitative, and high-throughput tools for microbial detection, identification, and characterization. Advances in printing technology have enabled the production of microarrays containing thousands to hundreds of thousands of probes. Although microarrays have been primarily developed and used for gene expression profiling of pure cultures of individual organisms, major advances have recently been made in their application to complex environmental samples. This chapter discusses the basis of different microarray formats and their application to issues of clinical interest. Several reviews on microarray technology have recently been published and may provide additional information of interest (Ye et al., 2001; Zhou and Thompson, 2002; Cook and Sayler, 2003; Zhou, 2003; Bodrossy and Sessitsch, 2004; Schadt and Zhou, 2005; Schadt et al., 2005). 2006 Springer.
