Patent ID: 7217510

Claim:
A method for providing bioagent characterizing information comprising: a) measuring or calculating with a mass spectrometer a plurality of molecular masses corresponding to a plurality of amplification products, wherein the amplification products are 46 to 166 nucleobases in length, and wherein the amplification products are obtained by amplification of at least one target sequence region of a bioagent nucleic acid gene sequence using a primer pair that hybridizes to the at least one target sequence region of at least nineteen bioagents; said target sequence region comprising two conserved regions that are hybridizable with the primer pair and that flank a variable region that uniquely varies between at least eight bioagents; b) interrogating a database stored on a computer readable medium with an identification query, wherein the identification query comprises comparison of the measured molecular mass of step a) with the database; said database comprises molecular mass calculated for the target sequence regions for at least nineteen bioagents and each of the calculated molecular masses is indexed to bioagent characterizing information; c) delivering from the database a response that comprises the bioagent characterization information generated by the comparison of the measured and calculated molecular mass of step b) thereby identifying the bioagent associated with amplification product of step a).