Footnotes

• Contributors DRo, DRe and PS conceived of the study and participated in its design and coordination and helped to draft the manuscript. SR, RK, EB, and KG carried out the experiments. RH developed the pattern recognition algorithms. LKN, DM, KM, AS, and TJ provided the bacterial isolates. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

• Competing interests DRo is a shareholder of GA Generic Assays GmbH and Medipan GmbH. The remaining authors declare that they have no competing financial interests.

• Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

• Open Access This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/