Application of horizontal staircase electrophoresis in agarose minigels to the random intergenic spacer analysis of clinical samples

The random intergenic spacer analysis is a recently developed technique for the study of microbial populations. The bacterial intergenic spacer (ITS) is located between 16S rRNA and 23S rRNA genes and presents different length and sequence among bacterial species. Therefore, the amplicons can be separated by electrophoresis commonly performed at low voltage during several hours. Although this technique is especially useful for unculturable microorganisms, it has not been applied before to clinical sample analysis. As these samples have a limited number of bacterial species, the size of the gels may be reduced to facilitate their handling and to reduce the running time. To obtain maximum separation among the ITS bands, we analysed in this work different electrophoretical conditions including staircase electrophoresis, a technique based on the application of several voltage steps. The results obtained showed a different behaviour of the electrical resistance during the performance of submarine horizontal and vertical staircase electrophoresis. In the first case the resistance decreased during most of the running time whereas in the second case it increased. Here, we show that the performance of horizontal staircase electrophoresis reduces the running time more than 80% with respect to conventional electrophoresis at low voltages. This procedure was applied to the separation of ITS bands from bacterial DNA present in a tissue from a vocal cord biopsy. The sequencing of these bands allowed their identification. This new procedure may be very useful in the rapid diagnosis of bacteria present in human, animal and plant tissues.