The Phytoplankton Chip - Development and Assessment of a Dna Microarray as a Reliable Tool for Monitoring of Phytoplankton

The recent introduction of phylochips that contain molecular probes facilitates environmental microbial identification in a single experiment without previous cultivation. A set of probes recognizing species at different taxonomic levels is denoted as a hierarchical set. Application of hierarchical probe sets on a DNA microarray allows the assessment of biodiversity with different resolutions. It significantly increases the robustness of the results retrieved from phylochip experiments because of the possible consistency checks of hybridization across different taxonomic levels. Here, we present a computer program, PhylochipAnalyzer, for the hierarchy editing and the evaluation of phylochip data generated from hierarchical probe-sets.