Construction and use of a computerized DNA fingerprint database for lactic acid bacteria from silage.

Efficient selection of new silage inoculant strains from a collection of over 10,000 isolates of lactic acid bacteria (LAB) requires excellent strain discrimination. Toward that end, we constructed a GelCompar II database of DNA fingerprint patterns of ethidium bromide-stained EcoRI fragments of total LAB DNA separated by conventional agarose gel electrophoresis. We found that the total DNA patterns were strain-specific; 56/60 American Type Culture Collection strains of 33 species of LAB could be distinguished.