Identification of fungal pathogens in a patient with acute myelogenic leukemia using a pathogen detection array technology

Abstract

Invasive zygomycosis in immunocompromised patients results in a high mortality rate, and early identification is crucial to optimize therapy and to reduce morbidity. However, diagnosing specific species of zygomycetes fungi possess challenge in the clinical laboratories. A need for a rapid and sensitive diagnostic tool for early recognition of a zygomycetes fungus in clinical samples to the species level will lead to prompt and accurate therapy and the PathoChip provides one such platform. We utilized a pathogen array technology referred to as PathoChip, comprised of oligonucleotide probes that can detect all the sequenced viruses as well as known pathogenic bacteria, fungi and parasites and family-specific conserved probes, thus providing a means for detecting previously uncharacterized members of a family. We rapidly identified a zygomycetous fungus, Rhizomucor pusillus, an otherwise challenge for the clinical laboratories, predominantly in a patient with acute myelogenous leukemia. This report highlights the value of PathoChip as a diagnostic tool to identify micro-organisms to the species level, especially for those difficult to identify in most clinical laboratories. It will also help clinicians to obtain a critical snapshot of the infection profile of a patient to plan treatment strategies.

Distinct Microbial Signatures Associated With Different Breast Cancer Types

“…Many of the microbial signatures that were detected in one or more of the breast cancer types were not detected in the healthy controls, as mentioned in the results section. Most of those micro-organisms were found in earlier studies to be associated with cancer and/or immunocompromised patients (Kontoyianis et al, 1994 ; Menon et al, 1999 ; Narikiyo et al, 2004 ; Aamir and Bokhari, 2005 ; Kristek et al, 2005 ; Ramanan et al, 2014 ; Abdulrahman and Gateley, 2015 ; Banerjee et al, 2015 , 2016 ).…”

Vascular endothelial growth factor encoded by Parapoxviruses can regulate metabolism and survival of triple negative breast cancer cells

“…Therefore, we would expect that the effect of the VEGF-E homologs would be more significant in the normal HMEC cells. There are previous reports that viral VEGF-E can stimulate cellular VEGF-A production 43 . To determine if the viral VEGF-E is the main driving factor for the enhanced proliferation, we have knocked down the cellular VEGF-A by shRNA and transfected those cells with the viral VEGF-Es and compared the cellular proliferation with the un-transfected cells (SI Fig.…”

“…Previous report from our lab was one of the pioneering study on TNBC that extensively identified different dysbiotic microbiomes 11 . In the present study, we have screened a new cohort of 11 TNBC samples and its corresponding matched controls and 10 non-matched controls using the previous protocol 43 . We found that dsybiotic Parapoxvirus signatures are the highest intensity of resident microbial genome signatures that are predominately found in the tumor samples compared to the matched control and almost absent in the non-matched control, which were validated by PCR using specific primers for the Parapoxvirus families.…”

“…Using Pathochip technology 11,43 we screened 11 TNBC samples (EXTN) and their corresponding adjacent normal tissues as matched control (EXMC), and 10 healthy breast tissues samples as non-matched control (NC) for the presence of nucleic acids from a wide range of different microorganisms. Unique and common microbial signatures associated with the TNBC samples were compared to that of the matched and non-matched control and was tabulated in the form of a heat map (Fig.…”

Detection of Microbial Agents in Oropharyngeal and Nasopharyngeal Samples of SARS-CoV-2 Patients

“…Furthermore, as this technique relies on the hybridization of both microbial DNA and RNA, the sensitivity and the accuracy are far greater than the current conventional techniques employed. A more detailed description of the technology was previously described in multiple published studies ( Baldwin et al, 2014 ; Banerjee et al, 2016 ).…”