Development of nucleic acid based techniques and possibilities of their application to rumen microbial ecology research

Abstract

Despite many years of research elucidating processes occurring in the rumen, still only around 10% of the rumen microbe is known. Molecular biology techniques seem to be a good complement of an information obtained by using the classical microbiology and therefore can enhance our knowledge about processes occurring in the rumen. The aim of this paper is to describe and to summarize a widely used techniques of the molecular biology during analysis of microbes in rumen. The main attention have been focused on the three of them which can be employed for quantitative and qualitative analysis of rumen microorganisms: PCR-DGGE, Real-time PCR and Fluorescence in situ hybridization.