Diagnostics: Species identification

The first step in microbiological diagnostics is to determine whether the patient carries a pathogen that can explain the observed symptoms, and if so identify what species and sometimes subtype the infecting pathogen belongs to. For infections caused by bacteria, the gold standard method has, since the beginning of microbiological diagnostics, been culture on agar plates followed by microscopy and further subcultivation. New rapid diagnostic methods challenge this old and slow method – some more successfully than others.