Clinical evaluation of the rapid carbohydrate degradation microtube method for identification of Neisseria species

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Abstract
The rapid carbohydrate degradation microtube method is a new test system designed for the identification of Neisseria spp. The system consists of 4 microtubes containing different carbohydrates in a peptone-Bitone basal medium. This method was evaluated for accuracy and speed in identifying Neisseria spp. Of the 386 clinical (human) isolates used in this study (gonococci, meningococci, Brahmanella catarrhalis, N. lactamica, N. sicca, N. subflava and N. flavescens), 98.4% were correctly identified to species level in 4 h with the rapid carbohydrate degradation system; parallel testing of the same isolates with conventional cystine-tryptic agar resulted in 96.1% accuracy in 48 h.