Challenges of Microarray Applications for Microbial Detection and Gene Expression Profiling in Food

Yanhong Liu Yan Wang

doi:10.4172/1948-5948.s2-001

Abstract

Microarrays are a high throughput technology used in molecular biology. The different types of microarrays have been applied to clinical and environmental microbiology, microbial ecology, human, veterinary, and plant diagnostics. Since multiple genes can be analyzed simultaneously, this technology has been extended to food microbiology for detection and gene expression analyses of food-borne pathogens. Although this technique has multiple applications, microarray technology presently has low sensitivity and also suffers from problems such as reproducibility and reliability. This paper focuses on microarray applications for microbial detection and gene expression profiling of food-borne pathogens including some of the challenges and key issues such as target nucleic acid isolation and selection of target DNA sequences.

Highlights

Microarray technologies that have been developed since 1995 are very powerful tools to simultaneously analyze a large number of genes or target DNA sequences
This review focuses on current applications of microarray technologies in both microbial detection and gene expression in food
Total RNA was isolated from strain F2365 in Ultra-High Temperature (UHT) skim milk after 24 hours at 4°C, reverse transcribed, labeled with fluorescent dyes, and hybridized to oligonucleotide (35-mers) microarray chips containing the whole genome of L. monocytogenes strain F2365 [43]

Summary

Introduction

Microarray technologies that have been developed since 1995 are very powerful tools to simultaneously analyze a large number of genes or target DNA sequences. The main applications of microarray technology in foods are i) analysis of bacterial gene expression, and ii) detection of specific microorganisms. The different fluorescent labeled cDNA samples (control vs treated) are mixed and hybridized to a microarray chip containing oligonucleotides or PCR amplified DNA fragments covering the entire genome of a bacterial pathogen.

Results

Conclusion