With the growing awareness that bacterial biofilms play a significant role in prosthetic joint infection, surgeons and investigators are increasingly looking to molecular technologies to enhance their diagnostic capabilities, but no clear consensus has yet CDK phosphorylation formed as to their reliability. Interrogation of joint aspirates with PCR-based assays has yielded conflicting opinion, having been interpreted as both encouraging (Mariani et al., 1996) and ineffective (Hoeffel et al., 1999). There are multiple factors that can lead to both false-positive (e.g. imprecise assay conditions)

and false-negative (e.g. contaminating inhibitors) results in PCR studies. One of the potential limiting factors of any given PCR protocol is that it should be able to survey and discriminate between the entire range of organisms known to be involved in prosthetic joint infections; although S. aureus and S. epidermidis are thought to comprise the bulk of causative organisms in infected arthroplasties, Gram-negative bacteria, anaerobes, and rare organisms have all been found as well (Fulkerson et al., 2006; Rafiq et al., 2006). The Ibis technology reported herein offers multiple significant advantages over any previously described PCR-based assay. It

simultaneously surveys a broad range of organisms (>3000), but is capable selleckchem of discriminating to the species level. It is rapid, with results potentially available as soon as 6 h after sample presentation, and it is largely automated. It provides semi-quantitative information as to the numbers of genome copies per well, providing an indication of the abundance of the organism(s)

in the sample, and it provides a confidence value for its results, essentially internally analyzing its own potential for error. It can provide information on antibiotic sensitivities, reducing the time necessary to direct adjunctive antibiotic therapy from ∼3 days to <1 day. The Ibis PCR-MS technology Unoprostone has been used to detect and characterize both bacterial (Whitehouse et al., 2010) and viral organisms (Grant-Klein et al., 2010), from both medical and environmental sources. It has multiple characteristics suggesting an excellent applicability to the diagnostic challenge frequently posed by prosthetic joint infection; in this case, it provided the first evidence of a multispecies infection, an observation subsequently confirmed by expanded culture, species-specific PCR, RT-PCR, and confocal microscopy using viability and FISH staining for targeted pathogens. We therefore submit that, pending a wider experience with the technology, the use of the Ibis T5000 system to evaluate clinical samples in suspected prosthetic joint infections may prove to be a superior means of diagnosis. A prospective clinical study is now underway to rigorously evaluate this hypothesis.