International audience In the forestry area, quarantine pest control begins with prevention. Rapid, reliable identification of a pest helps to prevent it from entering the territory and to contemplate early eradication when an outbreak is discovered. Identification methods mainly call on techniques for previously specified target pests in a plant or soil sample. The development of PCR type techniques (end point or real time) has made these detections very fast and reliable. Another approach works without a pre-specified target by conducting a microbiological inventory of the test sample. For a long time this has relied on conventional protocols for morphological characterisation but new DnA sequencing techniques (DnA barcoding, meta-barcoding) or proteomic analysis (MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry) now allow identification of pests that are not pre-specified. This opens broad perspectives for detection methods which may evolve towards techniques that more specifically target microorganisms on the basis of their potential pathogenicity.