I am working with phytopathogens. For the molecular identification, I need to amplify my bacterial DNA with primer. Usually, 16S rRNA is used as a universal primer. But for my bacteria, some of the articles suggest that to use gyrB gene primer set instead of universal primer for PCR.
I searched a lot and I could find that this gyrB gene is not a specific primer. So why they have been using this primer set for amplifying genome? Still I am in doubt with the primer set as there is no correct evidence about it.
what is the role of gyrB gene in species identification and is this act as a specific primer for speicfic bacterial population?
Hello Nayana Chathalingath ,
16S rRNA has been classically used for the identification of microbial species for a very long now. Just like 16S rRNA, the GyrB gene has also been extensively used in phylogenetics for bacterial identification. The GyrB gene is highly conserved since it encodes for the DNA gyrase subunit B of type II topoisomerase that enables to relieve bacterial DNA of the supercoiling during replication.
For further reading, I suggest this publication by Watanabe et al. in Nucleic Acid Research: ICB database: the gyrB database for identification and classification of bacteria.
Hope it helps you :)
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