Health-care associated infections (HAI) are the most frequent event in health-care settings worldwide affecting hundreds of millions of patients each year. Effective hygiene management – especially in hospitals – is key to prevent HAI as effectively as possible.

The challenge
Scenarios like multi-resistant organism outbreaks or suspicious resistance patterns for several samples in a short time period, demand quick information on the strain (sub-species) level for effective hospital hygiene management. Typing technologies like pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), multi locus sequencing (MLST) or whole genome sequencing (WGS) might not be available in the routine microbiology laboratory or are time consuming and/or expensive.

The answer
IR Biotyper is Bruker’s infrared spectroscopy solution matching the needs for fast, easy-to-apply and economical strain typing methods with high discriminatory power on the level of routine molecular methods. Sample preparation is easy and up to 30 isolates can be analyzed within one run with a processing time from culture harvesting to result of just three hours. Running costs are significantly lower in comparison to other methods.

IR spectroscopy is very well suited for strain typing and could ideally be combined with Bruker’s MALDI Biotyper MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry system, to meld the strength of rapid and easy microorganism identification via MALDI-TOF with IR strain typing into one workflow.

Individual molecular fingerprints
IR Biotyper is a Fourier Transform Infrared (FT-IR) Spectroscopy system measuring the vibrations of carbohydrate constituents present in many molecules such as glycoproteins. This FT-IR spectrum is a highly specific fingerprint allowing the identification of microorganisms on the subspecies level as for example Streptococcus pneumoniae subtypes.

The IR Biotyper analyses IR spectra in the wavelength range as indicated by the
colored spectrum area. Spectra are then analysed further for specific subspecies
characteristics.

Software made for hospital hygiene
The IR Biotyper system includes SW for system control and automatic measurement of spectra. Management of isolate metadata, creation of runs and data exploration are performed with the IR Biotyper software which features inter alia:

Consumables for easy sample preparation and quality control
The IR Biotyper kit includes prepared suspension vials for effective preparation of samples with short hands-on time and bacterial test standards for quality control.