Investigational Clinical Microbiology Core:  The ICMC supports banking and characterization of clinical isolates, environmental samples, and microbiome samples.  The ICMC has the capacity to perform detailed classification of antibiotic resistant clinical isolates such as but not limited to, sophisticated susceptibility testing procedures not routinely available in clinical laboratories, studies of synergies between combinations of antibiotics, techniques to identify heteroresistance (looking for subpopulations with resistance), molecular fingerprinting, qPCR, and genomic sequencing and analysis. 

Investigational Clinical Microbiology Core Biorepository: The ICMC biorepository contains a large collection of bacterial samples isolated by the Emory University Hospital (EUH) mircobiology laboratory as part of standard patient care, envrionmental samples and microbiome samples. These normally discarded clinical samples and specimens are processed and stored in the ICMC biorepository and made avaialbe to investigators for the purpose of subsequent evaluation, mechanistic studies, clincial correlation or novel assay development.  A corresponding database of all phenotypic laboratory characteristics of each isolate and important patient medical data is avaialbe. As of January 2022, there are over 17,000 bacterial isolates from approximately 9500 unique patients. The majority of these isolates are from blood infections.