Optimization of conditions for profiling bacterial populations in food by culture-independent methods.

In this study we used culture-independent methods to profile bacterial populations in food products. Denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) were employed in order to identify bacterial species without the need of isolation and biochemical identification. The protocols used to extract the DNA, subsequently subjected to PCR amplification for DGGE, as well as the hybridization procedure for FISH, were optimised.

A fuzzy distance metric for measuring the dissimilarity of planar chromatographic profiles with application to denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis data from human skin microbes: demonstration of an individual and gender-based fingerprint.

A newly devised fuzzy metric for measuring the dissimilarity between two planar chromatographic profiles is proposed in this paper. It does not require an accurately assigned sample-feature matrix and can cope with slight imprecision of the positional information. This makes it very suitable for 1-D techniques which do not have a second spectroscopic dimension to aid variable assignment.