Dr. Robert Whitfield used next-generation sequencing to detect bacterial DNA on explanted medical devices. NGS finds genetic material from organisms that traditional cultures miss, including dead bacteria and tiny amounts. Finding DNA doesn't mean infection, just that bacteria were there.
I was looking specifically at like, all right, how many of these explants have bacterial contamination that are existing within this? Like, what's the true incidence? How do we figure that out? And so the literature was really confusing to me. It ranged all over the place, and the sample sizes were relatively small. So we used next-gen sequencing. So the, the The testing used this NGS, next-gen sequencing, including bacterial 16S ribosomal RNA profiling. In plain language, this approach looks for bacterial genetic material and compares the detected sequences with the reference information that already exists in the database to estimate which organisms may be present. This can identify bacterial DNA that routine growth-based methods may not be able to identify. That includes genetic material from organisms that are difficult to grow, organisms that are no longer viable, or very small amounts of material. That is key.
