The ribosomal-RNA (rRNA) approach to microbial evolution and ecology has become an
integral part of environmental microbiology. Based on the patchy conservation of rRNA …

Like many other parts of microbial ecology, subsurface microbiology has entered the
molecular age. As one example of various powerful molecular techniques, fluorescently …

The frequent discrepancy between direct microscopic counts and numbers of culturable
bacteria from environmental samples is just one of several indications that we currently …

Determining the structure and dynamics of microbial communities is a core component of
microbial ecology. Traditionally, microbiologists used timeconsuming cultivation-based …

In situ hybridization with fluorescently labelled, rRNA-targeted nucleic acid probes is one
part of the rRNA approach to microbial ecology. As a whole, encompassing the sequencing …

Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) with rRNA-targeted oligonucleotide probes has
found widespread application for analyzing the composition of microbial communities in …

Culture-independent methods to detect microorganisms have been developed in parallel
with traditional culture-based methods ever since the classification of bacteria based on 16S …

The ability to quantify the number and kinds of microorganisms within a community is
fundamental to the understanding of the structure and function of an ecosystem. The simple …

With readily applicable hybridization assays, mainly based on rRNA-targeted nucleic acid
probes, and direct, cultivation-independent sequence retrieval, microbiologists can for the …

Culture-independent molecular surveys using the 16S rRNA gene have become a mainstay
for characterizing microbial community structure over the past quarter century. More recently …