The new developments in the decade that has passed since the publication of our
first edition of
DNA Fingerprinting in Plants and Fungi
have been more impressive
than one could ever have imagined at that time. Our first edition encompassed
basically all published work that employed DNA fingerprinting in plant or fungal
research. In the present edition, we not only had to restrict ourselves to plants, but
we also faced the difficult task of extracting a reasonable “core collection” from the
tremendous number of scientific articles that had appeared on the topic. We would
like to express our apologies to the many authors whose work could not be mentioned
because of space limitations, despite the more than 1600 references already listed.
Applications of DNA fingerprinting have blossomed in applied as well as in
basic plant sciences. In addition, the diversity of techniques has increased as well.
In particular, the balance of hybridization- vs. PCR-based methods has completely
been reversed during the last 10 years, with the latter now being the mainstay of
most molecular laboratories. We have the strong impression that the publications
related to the methodology and applications of PCR-based DNA fingerprinting
behave like the DNA in a PCR, i.e., they amplify exponentially. Given that a simple
update would never have worked, writing the new edition basically meant writing
a completely new book.