by Savichtcheva Olga, CIP, University of Liege

In the frame of the “Action de Recherche Concertée” MICRO-H2, the Center for Protein Engineering (CIP), Institute of Chemistry, University of Liege, held a theoretical and practical course on the application of fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) technique.

Course outline and learning objectives

The aim of this course was to gather researchers who would like to expand their knowledge on the phylogenetic identification and in situ detection of individual microbial cells without cultivation by FISH.
The ribosomal-RNA approach has been intensively used in the fields of microbial evolution and ecology and became an integral part of the environmental microbiology. Based on the conservation of the rRNA, oligonucleotide probes can be designed with specificities ranged from the species level to the level of phyla or even domains. When these probes are labeled with fluorescent dyes, they can be used to identify single microbial cells directly by FISH.