Abstract

This study aims to develop a rapid method for identifying pathogenic bacteria based on the sequence difference of pathogenic bacteria groEL gene. A pair of universal degenerate primers was designed to amplify the groEL genes of 34 major species of 16 genus’s of pathogenic bacteria. The conservation, variation and the interspecies phylogenetic relations of the groEL gene sequences were informatically analysed. Our results showed that the groEL gene fragments of the selected pathogenic bacteria could be amplified using the degenerate primer. The results of the sequence comparative study indicated that the groEL gene is characterized by conservation and variation, while the variation regions are distributed separately among the con-served regions, just like the mosaic. This conservation and variation coexistence of pathogenic bacteria groEL genes could provide a solid basis for the rapid identification of pathogenic bacteria and the development of a diagnostic microarray.

Key words: groEL, homology, phylogenesis.