“…In order to systematically assess the genetic variability of bacteria, several genome comparison techniques, e.g., macrorestriction analysis, PFGE, and genomic subtraction, have been used (9,39,49,58). DNA array technology is a powerful new tool for comparative genomics which has recently been used for the analysis of genome variability among bacterial species or closely related bacteria (2,4,18,19,43,50,53), as well as for detection of specific groups of trait-conferring genes (12,21).…”