Challenges of microarray applications for microbial detection and gene expression profiling in food

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. © 2011 Liu Y, et al.