Colony Hybridization of Bacterial Isolates with Burkholderia cepacia-Specific Probes

Colony hybridization is a very powerful tool for the examination of bacterial isolates that have been cultured. The advantages are that it can be used rather rapidly with a high degree of specificity to look at features of large numbers of isolates (1 ). For Burkholderia (formerly Pseudomonas ) cepacia , species-specific probes that target the 16S and 23S rDNA are available and can be easily used in colony hybridization (2 and 3 , respectively). Researchers are interested in B. cepacia for several reasons: it is abundant in nature (4 –6 ), it is valuable in bioremediation and biocontrol (7 ), and it is clinically important, causing disease in cystic fibrosis patients and other compromised individuals (8 ).