Molecular characterization of Salmonella isolates of poultry by Arbitrarily Primed Polymerase Chain Reaction (AP-PCR)*

The established culture based methods used to detect Salmonellae in animal feed are laborious, time-consuming, and often not specific enough. Several alternative analysis strategies have been proposed, and PCR in particular has been found to be a highly specific molecular diagnostic tool. Although this technique can be extremely effective on pure solutions of nucleic acids, its sensitivity may be reduced dramatically when it is applied directly to complex biological samples. Arbitrarily Primed Polymerase Chain Reaction (AP-PCR) is another tool for molecular typing which is found to be more specific than RAPD. AP-PCR is appreciably faster than other typing systems. The method is more susceptible to technical variation than routine PCR employing primers directed at known sequences.