A major difficulty in microbial ecology is identifying and enumerating the members of the microbial community, both prokaryotes and eukaryotes. The advent of PCR and molecular tools offers new windows into microbial communities that do not require cultivation, thus bypassing some selective artifacts and the effort required to maintain cultures. Our goal is to develop community microarrays that have the capability to assess thousands of taxa within a single sample, including important members of the microbial community. We describe the basic approach to microarray development and preliminary results from three lakes that are providing insight into microbial communities.
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