Metagenomic Approaches for Bacterial Detection and IdentiŠcation

Limitations of Culture Approaches. Traditional methods for bacterial identiŠcation depend on a combination of morphological and biochemical characteristics. The analysis of these traits mostly relies on the ability to culture the microorganisms of interest. Microorganims that grow well as single cells suspended in a liquid medium and as discrete colonies on Petri plates became the model for much of modern biology. Therefore, bacterial cultures became the gold standard for experimentation and the basis of almost all recent knowledge of medical microbiology, biochemistry, and molecular biology.