Leading the way with liquid-based microbiology

Historically, bacteriology specimens have been inoculated and streaked manually on an agar medium. Automation of specimen set-up in microbiology, unlike clinical chemistry and haematology, has not previously been fully explored. One of the main reasons has been the difficulty in replicating, with an instrument, the physical rolling of swabs on to culture plates. Liquid-based microbiology is a new approach for which a range of collection and transport devices has been developed to provide the laboratory with a liquid specimen.

Simple alternative
Patient specimens are now increasingly taken using swabs in specialist transport medium. For the screening of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), urine can be self-collected in a sterile sample container and transported to the laboratory for testing. In order to address the growing area of laboratory automation and the need to simplify urine sample collection, a new sponge-based urine collection and transport device (UriSwab) has been evaluated for microbial culture.

UriSwab is an applicator sponge impregnated with the precise amount of preservative required for sample collection and offers a simple alternative to the traditional urine collection and transport devices. UriSwab has also been evaluated for the detection of Chlamydia trachomatis and preliminary results have shown it performs as well as routine collection for the detection of C. trachomatis and is easy to transport, store and process in the laboratory.