It is now widely accepted that bacteriophages are the most abundant biological entities on Earth (1031 particles) (Brüssow & Kutter, 2005). They contribute largely to maintaining population densities and diversity of bacterial species, but also influence significantly biogeochemical and ecological processes including nutrient cycling, carbon flow and genetic transfer (Gill et al., 2003; Thurber, 2009). Classical bacteriophage taxonomy is based on their shape and size as well as their nucleic acid. Bacteriophages have been classified into 13 families; three of them (Myoviridae, Siphoviridae and Podoviridae) are members of the Caudovirales Selleck Dasatinib order that comprises about 96% of phages identified so far (5360

of 5568 reported to date, Ackermann, 2007). All these phages possess tail and double-stranded DNA. The 500 bacteriophage genome sequences available at present in the NCBI phage database reveal

the remarkable genetic diversity among phages, with genomes ranging from 15 up to 500 kb in size. Furthermore, bacteriophage genomes show a mosaic structure and each genome may be considered as a unique combination of modules whose size and rates of exchange selleck vary considerably among the population. Nevertheless, despite the lack of similarity at the DNA level, phages encode proteins with significant sequence similarity, reflecting a common origin (Hendrix et al., 1999). Recently, new phage classification schemes based on protein similarities have been developed for complementing the traditional classification (Lavigne et al., 2008, 2009). One of the main obstacles of phage biocontrol and phage therapy approaches is the narrow host range as a single phage may infect only specific strains. Thereby, the use of phage cocktails has been proposed (Sulakvelidze et al., 2001). However, assessment of the genetic Gefitinib diversity among a large collection of phage isolates would require effective propagation of each phage to isolate enough DNA for sequencing or analysis of DNA restriction patterns, which is time consuming and not always successful. Thus, a quick and reproducible approach would be very valuable to type new

phages whose genome sequences are unknown. Pioneering work has made use of fluorescence-labelled restriction fragment length polymorphism (fRFLP) to address bacteriophage typing (Merabishvili et al., 2007). Among other DNA-based approaches, random PCR amplifications of DNA segments using short primers of arbitrary nucleotide sequence have been used to generate specific profiles or genomic fingerprints that are used to compare the genotypic diversity among, for example, bacterial isolates (Johansson et al., 1995; Guglielmotti et al., 2006; Maiti et al., 2009), or whole bacterial communities (Franklin et al., 1999; Yang et al., 2000). Randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD)-PCR using purified DNA has also been used to assess the genetic diversity of vibriophages (Comeau et al., 2006; Shivu et al.