Detection of the bacterial content of a specific sample, irrelevant from its source, is not as straightforward as it seems. In clinical microbiology laboratories, the gold standard method for the detection of pathogens in patients suspected of systemic infections is the blood culture. However, this technique is known to have many drawbacks especially with regard to patient's antibiotics treatment, low abundance and non-cultivable organisms. Moreover, it takes usually 3 to 5 days to obtain a result from blood culture which is too late to initiate proper antibiotic therapy. Amplification-based methods such as PCR allow results in a more rapid fashion. However, their sensitivity, to date, are no better, and sometimes worse, than culture-based methods. more