Background <p>Brucellosis is an animal‑to‑human infection that is hard to identify in practice; its signs are vague and the laboratory tools used in routine care have clear limits. Bacterial culture is regarded as the reference test; the procedure is slow and has modest sensitivity, and in many hospitals clinicians rely mainly on serologic assays when they make a diagnosis. Over the past decade clinical microbiology laboratories have increasingly used next‑generation sequencing (NGS) as a tool for pathogen identification, especially metagenomic NGS (mNGS). In patients with suspected bru-cellosis clinicians and laboratory staff often see a mismatch between test results, with serological assays suggesting infection but NGS reports failing to detect Brucella, a gap between serology and sequencing that remains a frequent and unresolved problem in routine diagnosis.</p> Objective <p>This review brings together available data on how serological tests and sequencing-based methods in both metagenomic and targeted formats contribute to the laboratory diagnosis of human brucellosis and where they fall short.</p> Conclusion <p>It describes biological and technical sources of false-positive serology and false-negative sequencing and sets out a practical integrated way to judge and confirm mismatched findings so that laboratories and clinicians can use conventional and molecular tools together and reach sound decisions when brucellosis is suspected.</p>