Fluorescent Polymerase Chain Reaction/Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism Monitoring of Genes Amplified Directly from Bacterial Communities in So

There has been a growing acknowledgment of both the ecological and biotechnological importance of microbes in natural environments. Concerns about the nonrepresentative nature of traditional analytical methods, as a result of their requirement for prior cultivation, have led to the introduction of molecular biological approaches to these areas of study (1 ). Considerable effort has led to the development and application of a number of molecular procedures to profile the diversity of microbial sequences in environments.