Purpose

Accurate identification of bacterial isolates is an essential task of the clinical microbiology laboratory that enables initiaion of proper antimicrobial therapy. For many organisms, traditional phenotypic identification may be difficult, laborious and time consuming. This issue is further confounded by phenotypic variation within species, many newly described pathogenic species and the limited battery of phenotypic tests available to distinguish among established and potential bacterial pathogens. It is sometimes essential to identify bacterial isolates to species level in order to rule out species that are drug resistant or more pathogenic, to detect unsuspected pathogens, ascribe pathogenicity to species so far considered to be nonpathogenic and to identify new bacterial species.