Abstract

Challenges in Microbiological Laboratory Automation

Eric Claas, Principal Investigator/Associate Professor, Leiden University Medical Center

Diagnosis of microbiological infections by the medical microbiology laboratory has been carried out pretty much unchanged for decades.  Laborious culture techniques and subsequent biochemical identification has been the standard. Implementation of molecular methods has revolutionized microbiological diagnostics. Implementation of new methods has greatly increased the proportion of nucleic acid (NA) based assays in microbiology resulting in sensitive and specific detection of pathogens. Conventional diagnostic parasitology, i.e. finding parasites using a microscope, and virology, i.e. culturing viruses in cell culture, has been largely replaced by sensitive NA amplification techniques. This is not yet the case for conventional bacteriology because the bacterial isolate is required to perform antimicrobial susceptibility testing.  Where the bacteriology lab has remained relatively unchanged since the time of Pasteur, recently automation and robotics have entered this field as well. And although not all mechanism of antimicrobial resistance have been elucidated,  more and more molecular methods have been added to the diagnostic potential in bacterial infections.  Altogether, the increase of different pathogens being diagnosed by molecular methods as well as the increase in the number of samples processed has resulted in urgent need for robotics and automation in both work- and data-flow. Different possibilities in this respect will be discussed and a peek into the lab of the (near) future will be given.