Scanning of nucleic acids by in vitro amplification: new developments and applications.

Nucleic acids can be characterized using a variety of "fingerprinting" techniques usually based on nucleic acid hybridization or enzymatic amplification. The scanning of nucleic acids by amplification with arbitrary oligonucleotide primers has become popular because it can generate simple-to-complex patterns from anonymous DNA or RNA templates without requiring prior knowledge of nucleic acid sequence or cloned or characterized probes. Discrete loci are amplified within genomic DNA, DNA complementary to mRNA populations (cDNA), cloned DNA fragments, and even PCR products. The potential and limitations of the various genome scanning techniques, novel improvements, and their recent use in comparative and experimental biology applications, including the analysis of plant and bacterial genomes are discussed.