Terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism; a powerful technique for characterizing microbial community structure and dynamics

The advances of Terminal Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism (TRFLP) in analyzing microbial community structure and dynamics in soil, intestines, contaminated biosystem and pollutant treatment bio-reactors, as well as the main experimental steps and essential principle of TRFLP were detailed. This technique has many advantages over the other genetic fingerprinting profiles on demonstrating complex microbial community structure and shows broad applied perspective owing to its higher resolving power and higher throughoutput by integrated with automatic sequencers. As for the limitation of being unable to excise and sequence the interesting bands or hybridize in situ with the pattern, it might be complemented by comparing Terminal Restriction Fragments (TRFs) with cloned library sequences, or by comparing multi-digested TRFs with the present gene sequence database.