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. 2018 Oct 17;17(1):51–62. doi: 10.1038/s41579-018-0098-9

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© Springer Nature Limited 2018

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 1 — Various technical means are available for identifying the causative agents of microbial infections and for generating antibiotic susceptibility profiles, which can inform the suitable course of treatment (diagnostic routing). First, host factors, such as C-reactive protein (CRP), procalcitonin (PCT) and others are analysed to, for instance, distinguish viral from bacterial infection. Following the identification of the causative bacterial pathogen, antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) is the next step (except in some specific molecular tests) to generate an antibiotic susceptibility profile. AST ensures that suitable antibiotics are prescribed to a patient. Beyond the outlined routine diagnostic process, there is opportunity to follow up with fundamental research to analyse the presence of novel resistance markers (possibly identifying novel resistance mechanisms) and to determine the resistance levels to the antibiotic.