The Pathologist, August 03, 2020

Although molecular tests offer significant advantages over more antiquated techniques such as culture, they are still limited to a fairly narrow window of microbes that can be detected in a single sample. Metagenomics offers the next leap forward for infectious disease diagnostics by providing a powerful tool that can detect potentially unlimited numbers of known and novel microbes from a single sample in one test. Shotgun metagenomic sequencing enables users to easily evaluate the diversity of entire microbial populations, including novel, emerging, or uncharacterized pathogens. For the clinical microbiologist, this means the potential for truly hypothesis-free detection and quantification of all microbes in a patient sample without the need for any prior culture or growth steps.