title: Unravelling microbial communities with DNA-microarrays: challenges and future directions.
abstract: High-throughput technologies are urgently needed for monitoring the formidable biodiversity and functional capabilities of microorganisms in the environment. Ten years ago, DNA microarrays, miniaturized platforms for highly parallel hybridization reactions, found their way into environmental microbiology and raised great expectations among researchers in the field. In this article, we briefly summarize the state-of-the-art of microarray approaches in microbial ecology research and discuss in more detail crucial problems and promising solutions. Finally, we outline scenarios for an innovative combination of microarrays with other molecular tools for structure-function analysis of complex microbial communities.
authors.affiliation: Department of Microbial Ecology, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Vienna, A-1090, Wien, Austria. wagner@microbial-ecology.net
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Wagner
authors.forename: Hauke
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Smidt
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Loy
authors.forename: Jizhong
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zhou
mesh_terms: D044822:Biodiversity; D004463:Ecology / Q000379:methods*; D017753:Ecosystem; D004783:Environmental Microbiology; D004784:Environmental Monitoring / Q000379:methods; D023281:Genomics; D020411:Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends*