Array-based techniques for fingerprinting medicinal herbs

Chinese Medicine

Table 1 Comparison of the array-based techniques used for fingerprinting medicinal plants

	Oligonucleotide microarrays	Gene-probe based microarrays	DArT™	SDA	SSH-based arrays
Sequence information required	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Restriction enzymes used	None	None	Yes [usually one rare cutter (Pst I) and one frequent cutter (Taq I/Bst NI/Hae III)]	Yes [two frequent cutters (Hae III and Alu I)]	Yes [one frequent cutter (Rsa I)]
Subtraction Suppression Hybridisation required	No	No	No	Yes (one)	Yes (multiple pairwise)
Probe preparation	Chemical synthesis	PCR amplified products	Selective amplified products of the digested DNA fragments	Subtracted DNA fragments	Subtracted/Restriction digested DNA fragments
Target preparation	PCR amplified products	PCR amplified products	Selective amplified products of the digested DNA fragments	Restriction digested DNA fragments	the other choice against probe preparation
Dye system used*	Single-dye	Single-dye	Single/Dual-dye	Single-dye	Single/Dual-dye
Polymorphism rate	Species specific	Species specific	Up to 27%	Up to 68%	Up to 42.4%

Note: * The 'Dye system used' row reveals the dye systems used by researchers to fingerprint medicinal plants.
In practise, single/dual dyes can be used on all microarray platforms.

ISSN: 1749-8546