Applications of nucleic acid hybridization in microbial ecology
Nucleic acid hybridization can be deļ¬ned as the complementary base pairing between two nucleotide strands mediated by Watson-Crick hydrogen bond formation between individual nucleotides. As such, hybridization is central to biology, and is responsible for genomic rearrangements via both homologous and site-speciļ¬c recombination. Nucleic acid hybridization is also central to molecular biology, both in its direct application as a tool to detect speciļ¬c DNA sequences (1), and also as an integral process during the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and DNA sequencing during the hybridization (annealing) of oligonucleotide primers to complementary single-stranded DNA templates.