Fingerprinting nucleic acids with arbitrary oligonucleotide primers

Nucleic acids can be characterized by "fingerprinting" using a variety of techniques, usually based on nucleic acid hybridization or amplification. Nucleic acid amplification with arbitrary oligodeoxinucleotide primers has recently gain wide acceptance because it can generate simple-to-complex patterns from anonymous DMA orRNA templates without requiring prior knowledge of nucleic acid sequence or cloned or characterized probes. This review discusses this new strategy and its recent use in a variety of applications, ranging from plant breeding and cultivar certification to genetic mapping and population biology. i.