Synonym for 'amply outpace'

[kdewa]

Dear all,

I'd like to have some language advice for a sentence in the biology paper I'm writing.

I want to express the idea that 'the rapid emergence of [a microorganism] has "amply outpaced" the adaption of identification systems to identify it correctly'.

In other words: it emerged so quickly, that manufacturers of identification systems could not adapt their systems in time to allow a correct identification of this microorganism, at the time it had since long been already spreading in hospitals.

Even if the above sentence is correct English, it does sound a little bit odd. Also, can you say that the 'rapid emergence' outpaced 'the adaption of systems' (rather than the efforts of manufacturers to adapt their system -- but this makes the sentence a lot complexer) ...?

All suggestions for a more elegant expression of this idea are welcome.

Thanks in advance!

[Deinonysus]

The only grammatical error I see is that the word is adaptation, not adaption.

However, don't try too hard to make your language colorful and densely academic. This common habit makes scientific articles much more difficult to read than they need to be. I would recommend this essay by George Orwell:
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/pol ... sh/e_polit

You are trying to squeeze a complex idea into one clause with an abstract subject. This is how I would write the sentence, with two clauses that have clear and concrete subjects.

"[The organism] has emerged so quickly that manufacturers are unable to adapt their identification systems fast enough to keep up with it."

This also avoids double use of "identify".

[David1917]

I don't like "ample" here, unless you were discussing the speed with which ID systems generally adapt, and this one came out quicker than any other microorganism, thus being the first to beat the system. Even then, it would require some extra context like:

"Generally, identification systems adapt in real-time with the emergence of new microorganisms, due to some complex concepts I don't know about. However, the emergence of [this microorganism] was rapid enough to 'amply outpace' the identification system's ability to adapt and correctly identify it."

As for your second question - is the identification system's ability determined by engineers, or is there any adaptability within the system itself (AI?)

If the former, we can try something like:

"The rapid emergence of [a microorganism] effectively outpaced the ability of manufacturers to adapt the identification systems to be able to identify it correctly."