“…Specific examples of direct molecular monitoring approaches in soil microbiology are represented by DGGE, temperature gradient gel electrophoresis (TGGE) (Heuer and Smalla, 1997;Muyzer and Smalla, 1998), terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) (Kuske et al, 2002), single-strand conformational polymorphism (SSCP) (Schwieger and Tebbe, 1998), ribosomal internal spacer analysis (RISA) (Ranjard et al, 2000), and length heterogeneity-PCR (LH-PCR) (Ritchie et al, 2000). Among culture-independent fingerprinting methods, the DGGE, firstly theoretically described in the early 80s by Fischer and Lerman (1979), has been widely applied (Hoshino and Matsumoto, 2007;Coppola et al, 2011;Umar et al, 2017). To obtain optimal results in DGGE analysis, the first practical aspect concerns the high-quality extraction of total DNA from samples and then the control of amplification via PCR selecting universal primers targeting part of the 16S or 18S rRNA sequences for bacteria and fungi, respectively.…”