Patent Document ID: 9650682
Application ID: 14088971
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A method of identifying and classifying bacteria from the genus Dehalococcoides in a sample comprising: extracting genomic DNA from bacteria in the sample, wherein the sample is a mixed microbial culture comprising two or more taxa of Dehalococcoides; contacting the extracted DNA with a primer pair capable of hybridizing to a conserved region of a gene conserved across Dehalococcoides , where the gene is the uptake hydrogenase gene (hupL) and has a sequence identity of about 80% to about 98% among strains within Dehalococcoides and wherein the primer pair has the sequences SEQ ID NO: 1 and 2; amplifying fragments of the gene; sequencing the gene fragments; constructing a sequence alignment with the sequenced fragments and preparing a phylogenetic tree from the sequence alignment to determine the identity of the Dehalococcoides bacterial strains in the sample; and classifying the Dehalococcoides bacteria into taxa selected from the group consisting of: species, strain, and a combination thereof.