New Technique Rapidly Detects Harmful Bacteria

March 13, 2006 -- Scientists developed a rapid and efficient way to identify the presence of pathogenic bacteria within an unknown mixture of microbes. Using this sequencing-based method, the research team successfully distinguished between two closely related microbes -- a pathogenic soil bacterium and an anthrax bacterium. This new method should advance the study of microbes in the environment and improve the ability to distinguish between benign and harmful bacteria.

The multistep process, described in the March 2006 issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology, involves mixing various bacterial DNA with a specific enzyme capable of cutting the DNA into short segments. Creating short DNA segments allows for specific tagging and rapid sequencing of the pieces, resulting in the identification of each unique bacterium in the mixture. The more traditional technique of culturing bacterial populations involves more time and may favor the detection of certain bacteria over others.

A number of National Research Council reports discuss the need to rapidly identify microbes. Making the Nation Safer: The Role of Science and Technology in Countering Terrorism says it is necessary to develop rapid and sensitive techniques to detect harmful microbes in the environment. Microbial Threats to Health: Emergence, Detection, and Response calls for a global effort to address emerging infectious diseases and provides a set of recommendations for responding to the threat. Indicators for Waterborne Pathogens recommends improving current microbe detection methods and highlights the promise of using DNA-based techniques to determine the presence of pathogenic microbes in water.

• Making the Nation Safer: The Role of Science and Technology in Countering Terrorism (2002)
• Microbial Threats to Health: Emergence, Detection, and Response (2003)
• Indicators for Waterborne Pathogens (2004)

• "Use of Single-Point Genome Signature Tags as a Universal Tagging Method for Microbial Genome Surveys" in Applied and Environmental Microbiology
• U.S. Department of Energy's Microbial Genome Program
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Preventing Emerging Infectious Diseases: A Strategy for the 21st Century