In the basic procedure, starting from a cultured colony, ID
is performed by matching the measured peptide mass
fingerprinting against the MALDI BioTyper ORD, which can
be followed by a final review performed by a trained
microbiologist. Therefore, in the basic workflow, ID can be
carried out within a few minutes including database
searching. Multiple colonies can be spotted on a single target,
and simultaneous 30–50 IDs can be approximately performed
every hour. At basic-level (i.e., microbial ID), the MALDI
BioTyper up to now seems to offer high specificity, almost
no false positive rates, little operational costs, low technical
barriers for operators, and considerably faster time-to-result
compared to classical morphotyping (e.g., microscopic and
macroscopic ID), phenotyping (e.g., biochemical assimilation
patterns) or advanced genotyping methods (e.g., rep-
PCR, sequencing). However, customized library compilation
may dramatically improve specific diagnostic pipelines,
such as multi-drug resistant (MDR) strain tracking, specific
pathogen lineages IDs (e.g., nosocomial circulating strains
from immunocompromised patients, children or neonates;
food-related strains).