But a spokesman for Lower Saxony's Agriculture Ministry added he did not expect the tests to be concluded in the short term.
The beanspouts came under suspicion after it was found restaurants linked to the outbreak took delivery of the vegetable from north-east Germany just before customers began falling ill.
The E.coli outbreak has killed 22 making it the deadliest in modern history.
At least 2,153 people have been struck down by the food poisoning bug, including 11 in Britain.
© Associated PressSuspicion has fallen on beansprouts as the source of the bacterial outbreak which has killed 22 people across Europe
Government agencies warned consumers not to eat any type of sprouted seed grown in Lower Saxony. Popular sprouts include beansprouts, cress and alfalfa.
A previous warning not to eat raw tomatoes, cucumbers or salad in Germany was kept in place as a precaution.
Meanwhile German health services may run out of beds as the current E.coli outbreak puts hospitals under 'intense' pressure, a minister earlier admitted.
Daniel Bahr told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that 'the situation in the hospitals is intense' and that clinics outside of Hamburg and northern Germany - the epicentre of the outbreak - should take in patients.
Microbiological testing will continue as scientists try to prove if the sprouts are to blame.
Last night it was not clear if any major British supermarkets stocked German beansprouts, but the absence of any cases of E.coli among Britons - other than those who had travelled to Germany - indicates the infected produce was not imported into the UK.
A spokesman for Sainsbury's said: 'We definitely don't have any beansprouts from Germany on our shelves.'
© Unknown
He said: 'There was a very clear trail [to this company] as the source of the infection. It is the most convincing source for the E.coli illnesses.'
Mr Lindemann said beansprouts were the most likely source of the contagion, but added that infected people could also have eaten other types of sprouted seed from the same farm.
The infected farm is in the town of Bienenbuettel, 40 miles south of Hamburg, and delivered produce to restaurants in five northern states - Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Hesse and Lower Saxony.
It was not named but has been shut down and its produce has been recalled.
At least one worker at the farm was infected with the E.coli bacteria, Mr Lindemann said.
Eighteen types of sprout produced at the farm were under suspicion, including sprouts from different types of beans, broccoli, peas, chickpeas, garlic, lentils and radishes.
Berlin had previously blamed Spanish cucumbers for the outbreak, which has killed 21 people in Germany and one person in Sweden.
Scientists have warned that bacteria can get inside beansprouts, meaning that washing them might not be enough to remove the infection.
Medical experts have been shocked by the scale of the current outbreak, which has been caused by a virulent new mutant form of the E.coli bug.
© ReutersHospitals in northern Germany are struggling to cope with the amount of people struck down by E.coli
Scientists believe the restaurant followed correct hygiene procedures but could have used infected vegetables.
One 48-year-old woman in the group died from the infection.
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(NaturalNews) Even as the veggie blame game is now under way across the EU, where a super resistant strain of e.coli is sickening patients and filling hospitals in Germany, virtually no one is talking about how e.coli could have magically become resistant to eight different classes of antibiotic drugs and then suddenly appeared in the food supply.
This particular e.coli variation is a member of the O104 strain, and O104 strains are almost never (normally) resistant to antibiotics. In order for them to acquire this resistance, they must be repeatedly exposed to antibiotics in order to provide the "mutation pressure" that nudges them toward complete drug immunity.
So if you're curious about the origins of such a strain, you can essentially reverse engineer the genetic code of the e.coli and determine fairly accurately which antibiotics it was exposed to during its development. This step has now been done (see below), and when you look at the genetic decoding of this O104 strain now threatening food consumers across the EU, a fascinating picture emerges of how it must have come into existence.
Bioengineering a deadly superbug
So how, exactly, does a bacterial strain come into existence that's resistant to over a dozen antibiotics in eight different drug classes and features two deadly gene mutations plus ESBL enzyme capabilities?
There's really only one way this happens (and only one way) -- you have to expose this strain of e.coli to all eight classes of antibiotics drugs. Usually this isn't done at the same time, of course: You first expose it to penicillin and find the surviving colonies which are resistant to penicillin. You then take those surviving colonies and expose them to tetracycline. The surviving colonies are now resistant to both penicillin and tetracycline. You then expose them to a sulfa drug and collect the surviving colonies from that, and so on. It is a process of genetic selection done in a laboratory with a desired outcome. This is essentially how some bioweapons are engineered by the U.S. Army in its laboratory facility in Ft. Detrick, Maryland
Although the actual process is more complicated than this, the upshot is that creating a strain of e.coli that's resistant to eight classes of antibiotics requires repeated, sustained expose to those antibiotics. It is virtually impossible to imagine how this could happen all by itself in the natural world. For example, if this bacteria originated in the food (as we've been told), then where did it acquire all this antibiotic resistance given the fact that antibiotics are not used in vegetables?
When considering the genetic evidence that now confronts us, it is difficult to imagine how this could happen "in the wild." While resistance to a single antibiotic is common, the creation of a strain of e.coli that's resistant to eight different classes of antibiotics -- in combination -- simply defies the laws of genetic permutation and combination in the wild. Simply put, this superbug e.coli strain could not have been created in the wild. And that leaves only one explanation for where it really came from: the lab.
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