A new method could allow staph infections to be identified cheaply, quickly, and without requiring a biopsy.
Researchers have created a chemical probe capable of detecting staph bacteria in the body, a University of Iowa news release reported.
"We've come up with a new way to detect staph bacteria that takes less time than current diagnostic approaches," James McNamara, assistant professor in internal medicine at the UI said in the news release. "It builds on technology that's been around a long time, but with an important twist that allows our probe to be more specific and to last longer."
The probe looks for Staphylococcus aureus, which is common in hospitals.
"Every year in the U.S., half a million people become infected by S.aureus bacteria, and 20,000 of those who become infected die," Frank Hernandez, a post-doctoral researcher at the UI and first author on the paper, said In the news release. "We believe that we are significantly improving the actual methods for detecting bacteria with a simple approach, which we expect to be cheap, fast and reliable," the news release reported.
Staph bacteria biopsies can take a while to return with results, which can be dangerous to patients who would benefit from earlier treatment. Researchers created a probe that has a molecule on when end which glows under certain conditions and on the other is a molecule that blocks the light making it invisible.
Staph bacteria can separate the two molecules from each other, allowing medical researchers to spot the light.
"We designed a tracking system that specifically identifies bacterial body localization in less than one hour," Hernandez, a Colombian who for years has been working on probes to detect harmful bacteria.
The method was tested in both mice and human serum and proved to be effective.
"That's the central idea, the underlying concept of our approach," McNamara said. "If the probe gets cleaved by serum nucleases, then our probe would be lit up all over the bloodstream. But since it's split only by staph nucleases, then we can pinpoint where the staph bacteria are active."
