Frontiers in Medicine (Sep 2019)
Next-Generation Sequencing for the Diagnosis of Challenging Culture-Negative Endocarditis
Abstract
Diagnosis of culture-negative infective endocarditis usually implies indirect pathogen identification by serologic or molecular techniques. Clinical metagenomics, relying on next-generation sequencing (NGS) is an emerging approach that allows pathogen identification in challenging situations, as evidenced by a clinical case. We sequenced the DNA extracted from the surgically-removed frozen valve tissue from a patient with suspected infective endocarditis with negative blood and valve cultures. Mapping of the sequence reads against reference genomic sequences, a 16S rRNA gene database and clade-specific marker genes suggested an infection caused by Cardiobacterium hominis.
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