Vitek: a platform for a better understanding of microbes: A platform for a better understanding of microbes

Vitek systems are routinely used to identify clinical and environmental microorganisms and determine microbial susceptibility to antibiotics. The performance, accuracy, and reliability of these systems have been widely evaluated and presented in the literature. This chapter aims to introduce Vitek as a microbial identification and antibiotic susceptibility detection system and elucidate the principle of microbial identification. In addition, it presents conclusively the accuracy and reliability of Vitek systems to identify clinical and environmental microorganisms. It overviews the studies performed in the last 10 years. Vitek was launched in 1979 to identify pathogens, and later it was developed to different versions, such as Vitek 2, Vitek 2 compact, and Vitek MS. These systems identify microbe based on the developed color as a result of microbial utilization of the substrates in the cards and ionization of microbial proteins. Vitek systems provide good identification for wide ranges of clinical and environmental bacteria, yeasts, and molds such as staphylococci, enterococci, fermenting bacteria and Enterobacteriaceae, Candida sp., and Aspergillus sp. In addition, it detects microbial susceptibility and resistance to different antibiotics. In general, Vitek system's performances, accuracy, and reliability agreed with the other phenotypic, proteolytic, and genotypic techniques; however, in most cases, this concurrence has been found to be dependent on genus species. Some limitations in Vitek systems to identify certain microbes have been reported. Although these limitations have been mainly attributed to the capacity of the system's database and other factors, such as microbial age, purity, and load and user skills. It is established that the Vitek system could be used for routine identification of common microbes in food and clinical laboratories.