Polymerase Chain Reaction or the Detection of Listeria Species and Listeria monocytogenes

Traditional methods for the identification of some bacterial species can be time consuming and often necessitate the isolation of pure cultures before further characterization may be undertaken. Advances in molecular biology have allowed the identification of bacterial species by virtue of the unique nature of the DNA of a species, often using methods based on the hybridization of DNA probes. These methods, however, are often time consuming in themselves, but recently the development of a new technique, the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) (1 ), has seen a new approach to bacterial identification that is rapid, accurate, and easy to perform compared with earlier DNA probe tests.