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Applied and Environmental Microbiology, December 2002, p. 5999-6004, Vol. 68, No. 12
0099-2240/02/$04.00+0 DOI: 10.1128/AEM.68.12.5999-6004.2002
Copyright © 2002, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.
Department of Plant Pathology,1 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, Riverside, California 92521,3 Dipartimento di Statistica, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, I-20126 Milan, Italy2
Received 30 May 2002/ Accepted 8 September 2002
Thorough assessments of fungal diversity are currently hindered by technological limitations. Here we describe a new method for identifying fungi, oligonucleotide fingerprinting of rRNA genes (OFRG). ORFG sorts arrayed rRNA gene (ribosomal DNA [rDNA]) clones into taxonomic clusters through a series of hybridization experiments, each using a single oligonucleotide probe. A simulated annealing algorithm was used to design an OFRG probe set for fungal rDNA. Analysis of 1,536 fungal rDNA clones derived from soil generated 455 clusters. A pairwise sequence analysis showed that clones with average sequence identities of 99.2% were grouped into the same cluster. To examine the accuracy of the taxonomic identities produced by this OFRG experiment, we determined the nucleotide sequences for 117 clones distributed throughout the tree. For all but two of these clones, the taxonomic identities generated by this OFRG experiment were consistent with those generated by a nucleotide sequence analysis. Eighty-eight percent of the clones were affiliated with Ascomycota, while 12% belonged to Basidiomycota. A large fraction of the clones were affiliated with the genera Fusarium (404 clones) and Raciborskiomyces (176 clones). Smaller assemblages of clones had high sequence identities to the Alternaria, Ascobolus, Chaetomium, Cryptococcus, and Rhizoctonia clades.
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