A Comparison of Computational Approaches in the Molecular Identification of Pathogenic Organisms

Molecular based identification of pathogenic organism is becoming a routine procedure in many diagnostic laboratories. Ribosomal RNA is particularly the most popular choice for this purpose. Although, other targets such as `cytochrome b', `rpoB' and `actin' are highly effective, they have not been extensively used. This could be due to the lack of effective data collection method. We used sequence based exhaustive search of public sequence database to obtain all target sequences. This approach is currently being extended to collect such molecular targets for Nocardia and other slow growing medically important organisms.