The established culture based methods used to detect Salmonellae in animal feed are laborious,
time-consuming, and often not specific enough. Several alternative analysis strategies have been
proposed, and PCR in particular has been found to be a highly specific molecular diagnostic
tool. Although this technique can be extremely effective on pure solutions of nucleic acids, its
sensitivity may be reduced dramatically when it is applied directly to complex biological samples.
Arbitrarily Primed Polymerase Chain Reaction (AP-PCR) is another tool for molecular typing
which is found to be more specific than RAPD. AP-PCR is appreciably faster than other typing
systems. The method is more susceptible to technical variation than routine PCR employing
primers directed at known sequences.