In recent years, clinical laboratory instruments and reagents have been improved, and new methodologies have been introduced to the clinical laboratory. In this symposium, four guest speakers presented the following topics : 1) "Iatro IRE1" for measurement of elastase 1, which could be performed in a multipurpose automated analyzer, 2) "Lucimic MTB-SR" for rapid antimicrobial susceptibility testing , 3) DNA microarray for identification of bacterial species, which consisted of genomic DNA extracted from 100 standard Enterobacteriaceae bacterial strains, and 4) automated TaqMan PCR- "DNA extraction to analysis of results", respectively. This symposium showed the current trends in clinical laboratory, and further progress in these fields is expected.

* Department of Clinical Laboratory Medicine, Sapporo Medical University, School of Medicine, Sapporo 060-8543

【Key Words】 elastase 1, rapid antimicrobial susceptibility testing, DNA microarray, automated TaqMan PCR