Every year new laboratory methods are developed for the identification and classification of infectious disease agents. The number of new approaches to aid epidemiological studies of microbial pathogens is continuously growing. New biotechnology improvements have played a key role in leading to new findings in the fields of laboratory diagnostic and classification of important etiological agents. For each bacterial species, a number of different methods can be used to identify the organism and determine its possible relationship to an epidemic- or outbreak-related clone. Because of the...