Antibiotics susceptibility testing (AST) / agar diffusion

Antibiotic discs are used to determine the semi-quantitative in vitro susceptibility of common fast-growing and certain fastidious bacteria to antibiotics by the agar diffusion method.

This method is based on a standardized procedure published by the WHO (Expert Committee on Biological Standardization, 1992) and adapted as a common standard in various standards.

The guidelines of the German Medical Association (RiliBÄK) apply to practices with special laboratory services. These stipulate that state-of-the-art susceptibility testing of bacteria is only permissible with reference to a recognized standard. In Germany, the European standard of EUCAST (European Committee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing - www.eucast.org) is usually used in combination with the comments of the national antibiotic susceptibility test committee NAK (www.nak-deutschland.org). The CLSI (Clinical & Laboratory Standards Institute – www.clsi.org) standard is widespread in America.

We offer antibiotic discs for the systems of MAST, BD, OXOID (and on request Liofilchem). There is also our proven antibiotic ring (MD2417), which is tailored to the S3-HWI guideline.

You will also find various service documents to help you, such as reading templates with inhibition zones for easy evaluation of the agar diffusion test and a collection of guidelines in our media center for customers.

We show you how to handle the antibiotic discs and how to read the inhibition zones in our application videos and the AUROSAN hands-on courses on microbiology (current dates).