Abstract
The microflora of human intestinal tract is highly diverse and plays an important role in nutrition, immunomodulation, and colonization resistance against pathogens, etc. To understand the relationship between the function of intestinal microflora and human health, it is important to develop an accurate method to analyze the diverse structure of the microbial community. Since it has been confirmed that the 16S rRNA gene sequences are quite useful not only for analyzing the microbes phylogenetically but also for identifying and classifying them rapidly and accurately, molecular biological techniques have had a rapid development. With the rise of technology, culture-independent methods for analyzing intestinal microflora, such as FISH, DGGE/TGGE, 16S rDNA-clone library, quantitative PCR, or T-RFLP, have been improved significantly. This paper describes the brief information about molecular biology-based methods, which are widely used in the analysis of human intestinal microflora, their application and remaining issues.
