Facilitating early adequate therapy for patients infected by multidrug resistant bacteria calls for a novel precise and rapid diagnostic method as today’s resistance determinations are often slow and expensive.

A newly released paper by a team at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam display a new MS based method as an alternative to PCR and immunoassays. By combining high–resolution mass spectrometry with liquid chromatography (LC) they have developed a method to accurately and rapidly detect specific resistance mechanisms simultaneously.

Fig. 1: Overview of the LC-MS/MS pre-treatment used.

Targeted bottom-up mass spectrometry

The method was developed using targeted bottom-up mass spectrometry in order to accurately detect the four most prevalent carbapenemases in a single analysis. Digests were loaded onto Evotips, separated using the Evosep One and the 100 samples per day method. Detection was performed using the Thermo Scientific™ Q Exactive™ HF Hybrid Quadrupole-Orbitrap™ mass spectrometer.

The Evosep One allowed them to reduce turnaround time making method development faster and the methodology more fitting for routine diagnostics and decreasing hands-on time per sample. Also, no carryover was detected making blank runs redundant.
This new LC-MS/MS method could potentially be used to rapidly detect many other resistance mechanisms in a single assay as well.

→ View full article at Frontiers in Microbiology