Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14853, USA.
Division of Nephrology and Hypertension, Department of Medicine, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY, 10065, USA.
Nat Commun. 2018 Jun 20;9(1):2412. doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-04745-0.
Urinary tract infections are one of the most common infections in humans. Here we tested the utility of urinary cell-free DNA (cfDNA) to comprehensively monitor host and pathogen dynamics in bacterial and viral urinary tract infections. We isolated cfDNA from 141 urine samples from a cohort of 82 kidney transplant recipients and performed next-generation sequencing. We found that urinary cfDNA is highly informative about bacterial and viral composition of the microbiome, antimicrobial susceptibility, bacterial growth dynamics, kidney allograft injury, and host response to infection. These different layers of information are accessible from a single assay and individually agree with corresponding clinical tests based on quantitative PCR, conventional bacterial culture, and urinalysis. In addition, cfDNA reveals the frequent occurrence of pathologies that remain undiagnosed with conventional diagnostic protocols. Our work identifies urinary cfDNA as a highly versatile analyte to monitor infections of the urinary tract.
尿路感染是人类最常见的感染之一。在这里，我们测试了尿无细胞 DNA（cfDNA）在全面监测细菌和病毒尿路感染中宿主和病原体动态方面的效用。我们从 82 名肾移植受者队列中的 141 个尿液样本中分离出 cfDNA，并进行了下一代测序。我们发现，尿 cfDNA 非常有助于了解微生物组的细菌和病毒组成、抗菌药物敏感性、细菌生长动态、肾移植损伤以及宿主对感染的反应。这些不同层次的信息可通过单一检测获得，并且与基于定量 PCR、常规细菌培养和尿液分析的相应临床检测结果一致。此外，cfDNA 揭示了经常发生的病理，而这些病理在常规诊断方案中仍未被诊断出来。我们的工作确定尿 cfDNA 是一种非常通用的分析物，可用于监测尿路感染。
