Accurate Identification of Organisms Based on Individual Information Content

This method combines bioinformatics and molecular biology to identify an organism without first culturing it. It is particularly useful in the field of biological research and in the medical field, where rapid and precise identification of bacterial infections may help save lives. This quantitative method is useful for selecting hybridization or polymerase chain reaction primers, thereby eliminating the need to perform visual inspection of the DNA sequence alignments.

This method has potential uses in a wide array of industries.

• In the medical and pharmaceutical research industries, rapid and specific identification of particular strains of microorganisms is extremely important because different strains may potentially react differently to different treatments.
• In the food industry, the rapid identification of particular strains of bacteria like salmonella and E. coli in meat, dairy and produce products allows throrough hygiene monitoring.
• In the livestock industry, accurate and rapid identification of microorganisms in the mouth and internal tract of animals can point to the source of cvontamination, and lead to faster treatment and prevention of an outbreak.
• In the commer5cial beer brewing industry, a rapid and accurate detection of the germ contamination type can greatly decrease the amount of time that passes before initial remedial and preventative measures are taken. It can potentially save entire batches of beer from beer spoilage.

Present methods that are used to detect microorganisms suffer from various drawbacks.

• Detection and identification tests that involve fluorescence antibodies cannot precisely identify particular strains if there are other strains with a similar DNA sequence in the background.
• Detection tests that involve cultivation are slow.

By application of nucleic acid tests, this method rapidly and precisely identifies an organism without having to culture it first. It surpasses current organism identification methods because it can detect the DNA sequence of certain organisms, even when other similar ones are present. It also eliminates th eneed for visual inspection by utilizing a quantitative calculation method instead.

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