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Journal of Cellular and Molecular Biology Research

Clinical Microbiology

Clinical microbiology is a discipline that encompasses a broad range of testing methodologies, and it is complex in terms of organisms and methods used to isolate and identify them. Although significant improvements in testing methodologies have been made, clinical microbiology remains heavily reliant on culture-based methods and phenotypic methods for identification of culture organisms. The wide variety of pathogens and testing methods that are available makes microbiological testing challenging, and thus error detection and correction are important components of quality microbiology laboratory testing. Errors may occur at all stages of testing (pre-analytical, analytical, and post-analytical), and an error in one stage of testing is likely to overlap with or lead to errors in other stages (e.g., incorrect specimen collection can lead to culture, identification, and reporting of organisms that are not involved in the disease process and to incorrect or unnecessary antimicrobial therapy as a result). In the clinical microbiology laboratory, as in every other discipline, the frequency of analytical errors has been reduced considerably with the implementation of quality control and quality assurance programs. Despite the improvements in microbiological testing, microorganisms remain a constant challenge, and errors do occasionally occur. This chapter discusses some of the common interferences in the clinical microbiology laboratory. Recent technical advances in molecular diagnostics have resulted in the development of user-friendly automated testing platforms, such as real-time PCR. These novel-testing methods can be used to detect emerging and reemerging pathogens as well as common pathogens and have the potential for broadscale use in smaller laboratories in close proximity to the delivery of care. Over the last several years, many microbiology laboratories have implemented automation to process liquid specimens which have historically been inoculated to media manually. In some institutions, this automation has been able to free up staff to concentrate on other tasks and has resulted in increased efficiency in the laboratory setting. In addition to efficiency, there are ergonomic gains in the workplace due to the pre-analytical plating instruments since tasks that are manual such as de-capping and re-capping specimens are now performed by the automated processor. This functionality reduces the ergonomic impact of the manual task and improves the work place environment for the employee. This pre-analytical plating instrumentation is now being integrated within a suite of instruments referred to as Total Laboratory Automation, or TLA, which includes digital plate reading (DPR) and middleware technology applied to culture analysis. Citations are important for a journal to get impact factor. Impact factor is a measure reflecting the average number of citations to recent articles published in the journal. The impact of the journal is influenced by impact factor, the journals with high impact factor are considered more important than those with lower ones. Impact factor plays a major role for the particular journal. Journal with higher impact factor is considered to be more important than other ones. Impact factor can be calculated as average number of citation divided by recent cited articles published in 2 years.

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