The Institute of Veterinary Bacteriology has a long-standing experience in virulence assessment and pathogenicity of veterinary and human pathogenic bacteria including zoonotic agents. Besides the research unit carrying out projects related to this topic it hosts the Centre for Zoonoses, Bacterial Animal Epizootics and Antibiotic Resistance (ZOBA) and until the end of 2005 also the National Reference Centre for Enteropathogenic Bacteria (NENT). The connections to the NENT at a new location are still active through common research projects. Beside other reference functions the ZOBA is the Swiss reference laboratory for animal isolates of Salmonella and Campylobacter. Research focuses on the detection and characterization of pathogenic bacteria. This includes DNA-sequence based, phylogenetic analysis of bacteria using house-keeping genes like 16S rRNA gene, the rpoB or the infB genes, as well as pathotyping using specific virulence gene targets in Real-time and conventional PCR assays as well as DNA microarray systems. Moreover, there is a long standing experience in using the IDNSÒ Database allowing sequence based identification of veterinary pathogens, zoonotic bacteria as well as food-borne pathogens. (Peter Kuhnert)