Blood Culture Identification: Look mum! We made it into a post!

Welcome welcome! 👋
It's a new week, so it's a new BioConnections post! This week we're talking blood culture identification (BCID). BCID is covered mainly by Microbiologics and their QC panels, but you'll never guess what! We supply our own Fastidious Anaerobe Agar (F.A.A) for culturing your positive blood cultures on!

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Blood Culture Identification 

This week i’m excited to highlight two innovative solutions that are helping clinical and research laboratories streamline workflows and improve diagnostic accuracy. The Microbiologics BCID Panel offers a reliable, quality-controlled way to verify molecular blood culture identification systems, ensuring confidence in rapid pathogen detection when time matters most. 
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Complementing this, BioConnections (our own) FAA Agar provides a high-performance medium for the cultivation of fastidious anaerobes, supporting consistent growth and reproducible results. Together, these tools empower laboratories to maintain the highest standards in microbiological testing while enhancing efficiency and patient outcomes.

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Microbiologics 

First up we have Microbiologics (Who have a product for just about everything) and their Blood Culture Identification control panel (with 43 targets)

This nifty little panel comes with 6 positive control 1's, 6 positive control 2's and 6 negative controls. The make-up for each positive control is listed below for your convenience. BCID control panels are essential tools for ensuring the accuracy and reliability of blood culture identification systems used in clinical microbiology. These quality control materials are designed to monitor every stage of molecular diagnostic workflows, including extraction, amplification, and detection, helping laboratories identify variability, validate assay performance, and maintain compliance with regulatory standards.

For the eagle-eyes among you, you will have noticed I've also included Microbiologics' Gram-positive and Gram-negative blood culture control panels that come as inactivated pellets. The Gram-Positive Blood Culture Control Panel includes 3 pools containing 3-4 inactivated microorganisms per pool. Kits contain 5 vials of each pool (15 total vials) and feature colour coordinated labels for easy pool identification.
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The Gram-Negative Blood Culture Control Panel also includes 3 pools containing 3-5 inactivated microorganisms per pool. Kits contain 5 vials of each pool (15 total vials) and feature colour coordinated labels for easy pool identification.

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BioConnections

OMG looks it's us! We made it into a blog post!
Yes your eyes are working correctly, We offer our own F.A.A agar for you to pour your own plates. These plates have one of the same benefits as CHROMagar dehydrated media (if you think back to last week), it has a super long shelf-life! It comes in either 500g or 2.5kg that can be sent to you!

Our F.A.A agar has been around for quite some time (longer than I've been alive lol) and has been referenced in reports dating back to 1995. One of the main sources I could dig up was this Bordatella petrii Clinical Isolate article that used our agar to culture a bone biopsy specimen in 2005.

​Our medium also has the option to be made selective with the addition of antibiotic supplements. This is the medium of choice for the routine isolation of clinically significant anaerobes, our medium supports the growth of most fastidious anaerobes. Classical colony formation, odour and fluorescence under UV are diagnostic features on this medium. The choice of peptones and growth factors provide early growth of most organisms whilst the starch has an important role as a de-toxification agent. The medium is often made selective for various groups of anaerobes by the addition of appropriate selective agents.

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That's all for this week! Next week we're going to talk about STI and women's health (HPV screening and such)