R I F L E

Rapid Identification by Fragment Length Evaluation

Same information in German

User manual

A tool for the fast, 16S rDNA-based identification of microorganisms without sequencing

The 16S rDNA is frequently used for the phylogenetic identification of microorganisms [AMANN95]. Sequencing large numbers of clones, however, is still costly and time-consuming. The generation of restriction patterns by digestion with restriction enzymes and subsequent fragment length determination is much faster and has been frequently used in taxonomic studies to distinguish species [GURTLER91].

The RIFLE system compares restriction patterns of possibly unknown microorganisms against a database of theoretical restriction patterns generated from a 16S rDNA database, e.g. the RDP database. It returns a list of microorganisms whose theoretical restriction patterns match the laboratory patterns.

RIFLE has been designed to behave very sensibly in the presence of experimental errors as well as uncertainty in database entries. Restriction patterns of multiple restriction enzymes can be combined to improve the quality of identification, additional parameters allow the individual adaptation to laboratory processes, e.g. exactness of fragment length determination.

Any comments, suggestions or technical problems? Please send email to the bibi-help(at)techfak.uni-bielefeld.de

Author:Henning Hermjakob, ihhermja@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de

Last modified $Date: 2002/12/06 14:32:28 $ by $Author: hmersch $.