The work I do deals with extracting DNA from environmental samples (i.e. soils, hyphal mats) and using that DNA to profile bacterial and fungal communities in those samples. When we compare the communities in soils that are very similar but differ in one characteristic (ie. ability to suppress a plant pathogen) we can make inferences about which groups of organisms may be involved in the characteristic we are studying (ie. soil suppressiveness). The technique I use to do all this is called "oligonucleotide fingerprinting of ribosomal RNA genes", or OFRG, and it has been developed in my laboratory.
This is a site intended for biologists/ computer scientists, but it does have links to a couple of posters I presented in 2004
