Blood culture and flow cytometry
I was wondering about how long it takes to get the results of a blood culture and the fact that they don’t yield great results in most cases, which led me to think about flow cytometry and how it might be able to detect bacteria faster than waiting for bacteria to grow in a blood culture.
Turns out other people have worked on this idea with really cool results. I came across a commentary on this particular idea in a journal called Cytometry and it had me smiling like a loon. The commentary was titled ‘Trash your agar plates! Blood stream bacteria are now quantified by in vivo flow cytometry’ by Jakob Zimmermann. Would definitely recommend going through it!!! In addition to answering my original question it also talks about in vivo flow cytometry.
An interesting observation mentioned in the commentary is about the different clearance patterns of bacteria from the blood, and that in turn raises a host of new questions to explore. Like would it be possible to identify a bacteria just by its clearance pattern? Can this clearance pattern help in diagnosing immune disorders? What factors affect the clearance patterns?
That’s all for now