Question

Describe the steps you would take to isolate, cultivate, and identify a microbial pathogen from a urine sample.

Answer 1

Urine culture is

• Used to diagnose a urinary tract infection and identify the bacteria causing the infection.

The following are the steps of urine culture

1.Collect the urine sample

2.place the urine sample on agar plats ,agar are the nutrient media for the growth of the pathogen.

3.After this , incubate the plats at body temperature .If there is any pathogens are present in the urine sample it will grow into the colonies with in the next 24 to 48 hours

4.Identification of pathogen ,from the colonies we can determine which pathogen is present in the urine sample .

This method is used to find only single pathogen type and there may be a chance that more than one pathogen is present in the urine sample. This may be due to codamination of urine during collection .

5.After identification ,gram staining is done to examine the microorganisms under microscope .There are different pathogens are identified according to colour and shape . For e.g E .Coli appear as pink and lactobacillus appear as thin purple rods under microscope .For some of the pathogens, no further investigation is required. But further investigation is needed for some pahogens.

If there is little or no growth after 24 to 48 hours of incubation, urine culture is considered negative for pathogens.