This method is meant to enable species identification or assignment of bacterial nucleotide sequence to a taxonomical group of bacteria since the target sequence includes variable and highly variable sequences that might serve as signature sequences. Therefore the herein described PCR method should be performed and followed by sequence analysis of the amplified PCR product (Official Collection of Methods according to § 28b GenTG, G 21.40-1).

Sequence analysis of the amplified PCR product might be conducted by capillary electrophoresis and subsequent bioinformatic search for sequence homology. The Basic Local Alignment Search Tool ‘nucleotide blast’ (blastn algorithm with the database ‘Nucleotide collection (nr/nt)’) provided by NCBI might be a suitable tool to perform bioinformatic sequence analysis; other databases to be used are the Ribosomal database project (RDP), Ribosomal Differentiation of Microorganisms (RIDOM) or the non-public MicroSeq.

It needs to be noted that the described method might not be sufficient to definitely identify a specific species.