Patent ID: 7979446

Claim:
A method comprising: submitting a plurality of pathogen biological sequences in queries to a taxonomic database to produce a plurality of taxonomic results; wherein the pathogen biological sequences are the output of genetic database queries that return a score for each sequence; determining whether the taxonomic results contain only a single taxon; determining whether the highest score among the plurality of pathogen biological sequences exceeds the score of the pathogen biological sequence having the second highest score by a predetermined score ratio threshold; determining whether all the taxonomic results contain only a child taxon and a direct parent taxon to the child taxon; and reporting a taxonomic identification based on the taxonomic results; wherein reporting the taxonomic identification uses one of the following criteria-based steps, the choice of step being the first step wherein the criterion is satisfied: reporting the single taxon when the taxonomic results contain only the single taxon; reporting the taxonomic result of the pathogen biological sequence having the highest score among the plurality of sequences when the highest score exceeds the score of the pathogen biological sequence having the second highest score by the predetermined score ratio threshold; reporting the child taxon when all the taxonomic results contain only the child taxon and the direct parent taxon to the child taxon; and reporting a common parent taxon in all other cases; and wherein the method is performed using a suitably programmed computer.