Nmic id panel

A 5-mL broth was aspirated from the flagged positive blood culture bottle using a sterile disposable syringe. The broth was then dispensed into a sterile BD Vacutainer SST II Advance tube and centrifuged at 2,000 × g for 15 minutes in the Neya 16R Centrifuge instrument (REMI, India). After centrifugation, the supernatant was discarded, and the bacterial pellets trapped in the gel layer were carefully harvested with StabiFlexLoop (HiMedia Laboratories, India) of 1.25-mm diameter. A 0.5 McFarland bacterial inoculum was prepared from the harvested bacterial pellets using BD PhoenixSpec nephelometer (Becton Dickinson, USA). NMIC/ID panel (Becton Dickinson, USA) was inoculated with the standard bacterial suspension per the manufacturer’s instructions. NMIC/ID panel is used for Gram-negative organisms only. Each panel contains a set of wells (five for each antibiotic) with varying concentrations of different antimicrobial agents. Additionally, there are 51 wells containing different identification substrates. The panel was loaded into the BD Phoenix M50 system (Becton Dickinson, USA) for automated ID and AST of the bacterial isolate. The system tracks the growth of microorganisms in all wells and displays identification and susceptibility results using the patterns of microbial growth.

Blood agar and MacConkey agar plates were inoculated with blood culture broths from the flagged positive blood culture bottles showing Gram-negative rods and incubated in a 5% CO₂-rich environment at 37°C for 18–24 hours. Standardized bacterial inoculum (0.5 McFarland) was prepared from bacterial colonies isolated as pure culture on the solid media with the help of BD PhoenixSpec nephelometer (Becton Dickinson, USA). NMIC/ID panel (Becton Dickinson, USA) was inoculated with the standard bacterial suspension per the manufacturer’s instructions, and the panel was loaded into BD Phoenix M50 (Becton Dickinson, USA) for automated ID and AST of the bacterial isolate.
The Kirby-Bauer disk diffusion method was also performed using 10-cm diameter Mueller Hinton agar (MHA) plates (HiMedia Laboratories, India) and different antibiotic disks (HiMedia Laboratories, India) with the same standard bacterial inoculum and incubated at 35°C ± 2°C in ambient air for 16–18 hours. AST results were interpreted as per the performance standards for AST by CLSI (12 ).