A groundbreaking new technique will slash the time it takes to detect potentially lethal golden staph infection from two days to just two hours.
Researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale BioPhotonics (CNBP) targeted the bacterium with a luminescent DNA probe.
“This allows us to find the “needle in the haystack” because only the “needle” lights up,” says Dr Nima Sayyadi, Research Fellow at the Macquarie University node of the CNBP and lead author on the paper.
Golden staph, or Staphylococcus aureus, lives on the skin or in the nose. It is usually harmless, but if it enters the skin through a cut it can cause a range of infections, which in some cases are fatal.
In the most at-risk patients, such as the elderly, it is vital to identify the infection and begin treatment with appropriate antibiotics as soon as possible. However, current identification techniques require culturing cells for up to two days to provide a positive infection result.
The new approach, known as Time-Gated Luminescent in Situ Hybridization (LISH), takes just two hours and could have a range of other applications. While it cannot yet separately identify drug resistance strains of golden staph, researchers are working on it.
CNBP scientists are also working on a range of transformational research projects based on the luminescence based detection of single cells in human body fluid samples, which will help them label antibodies and molecules as well as DNA.
“We’ve also done work in prostate cancer and bladder cancer where the target cell can be quickly and easily identified in urine samples,” says Project Lead and CNBP node leader at Macquarie University, Professor James Piper AM.
The research was reported in the journal Molecules, which you can read here.