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Many types of microbial sensors have been developed as analytical tools since the first microbial sensor was studied by Karube et al. in 1977. The microbial sensor consists of a transducer and microbe as a sensing element. The characteristics of the microbial sensors are a complete contrast to those of enzyme sensors or immunosensors, which are highly specific for the substrates of interest, although the specificity of the microbial sensor has been improved by genetic modification of the microbe used as the sensing element. Microbial sensors have the advantages of tolerance to measuring conditions, a long lifetime, and cost performance, and also have the disadvantage of a long response time. In this review, the long history of microbial sensor development is summarized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

DNA microarrays provide a means for the detection of thousands of discrete nucleic acid sequences in a single experiment. They are widely used tools in molecular biology research for profiling differential gene expression and studying DNA variation. Since DNA microarrays were invented in the early 1990s, most of the technological development has focused on analyses of mammalian gene expression. However, recent years have witnessed a rapid increase in microarray usage for bacterial genotyping (Fig. 9.1). The majority of these studies has been concerned with the identification of genomic differences among related bacterial isolates or the detection of diagnostic marker sequences in clinical or environmental samples. Fig. 9.1. Numbers of scientific publications on the use of microarrays for bacterial genotyping, in the years 1997–2004 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]