Background
Urine is one of the most common specimen types submitted to the clinical microbiology laboratory; the use of chromogenic agar is one method that might speed up culture results and reduce hands-on time and materials required for urine culture analysis. A major advantage of most of the chromogenic agars is the ability to directly identify E. coli while for the other uropathogens an identification confirmation is required by the use of MALDI-TOF MS.
The COPAN Colibrí™ is a new automated system designed to automatically prepare the target for MALDI-TOF MS identification. Colibrí™ adopts pipettor tips to transfer colonies from agar plates to the target and to cover them with matrix, allowing standardization of target preparation and patient’s sample traceability.
The objective of this study was to evaluate the performance of Colibrí™ target preparation and the following MALDI-TOF identification capability (Bruker Biotyper System) when uropathogen colonies grow on different chromogenic agar or on blood-agar-based media.
