Pitfalls of restriction enzyme analysis in identifying, characterizing,typing, and naming viral pathogens in the era of whole genome data, as illustrated by HAdV type 55

Restriction endonuclease analysis(REA),or restriction fragment length polymorphism(RFLP),was useful for identifying and determining the relatedness and putative identities of microbial strains(Tang et al.,1997)and for characterizing and discriminating large numbers of samples inexpensively in the past。