Strain typing with IR Biotyper

Health-care associated infections (HAI) are the most frequent event in health-care settings worldwide affecting hundreds of millions of patients each year. Effective hygiene management – especially in hospitals – is key to prevent HAI as effectively as possible.

Scenarios like multi-resistant organism outbreaks or suspicious resistance patterns for several samples in a short time period, demand quick information on the strain (sub-species) level for effective hospital hygiene management. Typing technologies like pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), multi locus sequencing (MLST) or whole genome sequencing (WGS) might not be available in the routine microbiology laboratory or are time consuming and/or expensive.

Not for use in diagnostic procedures.

IR Biotyper is Bruker’s infrared spectroscopy solution matching the needs for fast, easy-to-apply and economical strain typing methods with high discriminatory power on the level of routine molecular methods. Sample preparation is easy and up to 30 isolates can be analyzed within one run with a processing time from culture harvesting to result of just three hours. Running costs are significantly lower in comparison to other methods.

IR spectroscopy is very well suited for strain typing and could ideally be combined with Bruker’s MALDI Biotyper MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry system, to meld the strength of rapid and easy microorganism identification via MALDI-TOF with IR  strain typing into one workflow.