TaqMan Questions

[Gottfried Dasen]

Hi

I have two questions concerning the TaqMan PCR technique:

I want to detect the "total bacterial DNA" load of various samples
(food, ....). (in order to compare it with the incidence of other
genes).
Does anybody have a suggestion for a promising target gene (16S rDNA is
not a single copy gene, so its of no real use to me).
Ideally such a gene should be ubiquitous (well, I'll settle for: present
in most bugs), single copy, enough DNA-seqs published, ..

Do you have any suggestions ?

Since I'm going to quantitate DNA, I  also must use a quantitative DNA
extraction method.
So far nobody seems to have payed attention to these fact or at least I
couldn't find any work on it.

Does anyone have experience with this ?

Thanks in advance !
---
Dr. Gottfried H. Dasen
ETH, Laboratory of Food Microbiology
LFO G23
CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland
phone:     +41 1 632 53 78
fax:       +41 1 632 12 66
dasen at ilw.agrl.ethz.ch