In any event, the need for culturing is rare and by removing the culturing step, critical time is saved. More important than saving time, the elimination of the need for culturing allows for the rapid detection of organisms that are difficult or impossible to culture. This would include organisms such as certain viruses, fungi, anaerobes and mycoplasma. Third, PCR is cost-effective. When one considers culturing of a microbe, few consider time as an associated cost, even though this is probably the most costly aspect of culturing-based methods.
Most samples have to be cultured and re-cultured for proper identification.
In contrast, most antibody assays generally require little hands-on time but the assays themselves are expensive. This, of course, depends on the sample, technician, and the technique used to isolate the nucleic acids. Since PCR takes less time overall to set up, it costs less to conduct. PCR does, however, require a thermal cycler, UV source and some type of image capture device, thus the initial costs of setting up a PCR lab can be high. If a lab only conducts a low volume of testing then the initial expenses that go along with establishing PCR capability may not be justified.