Enjoy the studies we selected for you this month:

• Multi-drug resistant fungus Candida Auris is recognized as a critical issue by the WHO. Its permanence on human skin and surfaces makes hospital surveillance protocols essential to prevent nosocomial outbreaks. The study by Curtoni and colleagues aimed to apply Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy to examine the phylogenetic relationships among strains isolated from a C. auris outbreak in the ICU of a hospital in Turin, Italy. The results identified a dominant Alpha cluster and a minor Beta cluster. These findings were validated using an external C. auris strain and through Principal Component and Linear Discriminant Analyses. This study results highlight how FT-IR technology can provide valuable information on the phylogenetic relationships between microorganism strains and propose FT-IR as a cost-effective alternative to molecular methods for rapid and efficient typing of C. auris strains, with important clinical implications.
• The 2022 global spread of monkeypox led to the expansion of diagnostic testing worldwide. In the second study we selected, the Canadian researchers collected specimens from patients in Ontario to evaluate the performance characteristics of five RT-PCR assays in detecting Monkeypox during the 2022 outbreak. Swabs from various anatomical sites were collected, and all assays demonstrated excellent negative percent agreement, positive percent agreement, limit of detection, and precision. An amplicon-based whole-genome sequencing analysis identified six different monkeypox lineages. These results underline the need for performance monitoring to detect assay escape mutants and ensure the universal detection of evolving monkeypox strains.
• The third study investigated the culture of Mycobacterium tuberculosis from tongue swabs, either experimentally spiked after collection from healthy controls or directly sampled from patients with microscope-confirmed pulmonary tuberculosis. The performance of three culture processing methods was evaluated: NALC-NaOH/MGIT960 (MGIT), Kudoh-Ogawa (KO), and cetylpyridinium chloride-L¨owenstein-Jensen (CPC/LJ). Overall, the study concludes that MGIT is the optimal method for culturing Mycobacterium tuberculosis from tongue swabs. Anyhow

Read the full studies: