In silico evaluation of a novel DNA chip based fingerprinting technology for viral identification.

The identification of microorganisms by whole genome DNA fingerprinting was tested "in silico". 94 HPV genome sequences were submitted to virtual hybridization analysis on a DNA chip with 342 probes. This Universal Fingerprinting Chip (UFC) constitutes a representative set of probes of all the possible 8-mer sequences having at least two internal and non contiguous sequence differences between all them.