CLASSIFICATION AND IDENTIFICATION OF BACTERIA - CURRENT APPROACHES TOAN OLD PROBLEM - OVERVIEW OF METHODS USED IN BACTERIAL SYSTEMATICS

Most of the bacterial species are still unknown. Consequently, our kno wledge about bacterial ecology is poor and expectations about speciali zed species with novel enzymatic functions or new products are high. T hus, bacterial identification isa growing field of interest within mic robiology. In this review, suitability of developments for identificat ion based on miniaturized biochemical and physiological investigations of bacteria are evaluated. Special emphasis is given to chemotaxonomi c methods such as analysis of quinone system, fatty acid profiles, pol ar lipid patterns, polyamine patterns, whole cell sugars, peptidoglyca n diaminoacids, as well as analytical fingerprinting methods and cellu lar protein patterning. 16S rDNA sequencing introduced to investigate the phylogenetic relationships of bacteria, nucleic acids hybridizatio n techniques and G + C content determination are discussed as well as restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP), macrorestriction anal ysis and random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD). The importance of th e different approaches in classification and identification of bacteri a according to phylogenetic relationships are demonstrated on selected examples.