Why are there no biochemical tests for the identification of archaea? If there are any biochemical tests available to identify archaea, please kindly provide the links or materials or references where I can get the information from.
Depends on what you mean by biochemical tests. Archaea have a few differences from Bacteria, which may be helpful in an identification.
The easiest approach is PCR. A PCR with archaeal specific primers or a PCR with universal primers followed by sequencing will work.
Other than 16S sequence, one of the main archaeal identifiers is the chemical composition of the lipid membrane. Archaeal membranes are made up of primarily fatty acids linked to glycerol via ether linkages (bacterial and eukarya have ester linkages).
Many archaea have pseudopeptidoglycan (a.k.a. pseudomurein), which is N-acetylglucosamine beta1,3 linked to N-acetyltalosaminuronic acid.
For a biochemical test the outer cell envelope (S-layer or pseudomurein) can be used only for certain species of Archaea. Not all Archaea comprise these features. However, best would just be to amplify 16SrRNA gene with Archaea specific primer, as our colleague already mentioned. Nevertheless, for certain archaeal subgroups specific biochemical tests for certain co-factors i.e. F430 or F420 would be feasible. Also detection of auto-fluorescence by microscopy can be used (also only certain archaeal groups).
Hi...
Our problem is that we are struggling to extract the DNA and now we are thinking that what we are dealing with is not Bacteria but Archae.
Any quick and easy way to find out if this is bacteria or archae?
I agree with you, we need archaea biochemical tests for comparing results. On the other hand, some countries lack of expensive equipments and use to manipulate biochemical tests. We should see far away...
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