About this Research Topic

Background

The incidence of infectious diseases is high and often causes critical illness, which is a severe threat to human life and health. The diagnosis and treatment of infectious diseases depend on etiological detection techniques. Therefore, etiological detection technology is required to achieve timely, accurate and comprehensive detection of pathogens. The traditional etiological diagnosis methods of infection mainly include morphological detection, microbial culture, smear microscopic examination, antigen and antibody detection, nucleic acid detection, etc. However, these methods have many limitations, such as long detection cycles, low sensitivity, narrow detection spectrum of pathogens, etc. Especially for the infection caused by rare or new pathogens, the traditional pathogenic microorganism detection methods can not effectively deal with it. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a series of more powerful pathogen detection tools. mNGS is a powerful approach for pathogen detection, which does not need culture. It can detect many pathogenic microorganisms, such as bacteria, fungi, viruses and parasites. mNGS has been recognized as a provocative technique for pathogen detection, especially for rare and complex infectious diseases. Sherlock system, a molecular detection platform based on CRISPR-Cas technology, has also been used to detect pathogens such as Zika virus, dengue virus, African classical swine fever virus and tuberculosis. Although emerging technologies such as mNGS and CRISPR-Cas system have played an active role in diagnosing clinical infection, the novel pathogen molecular diagnosis methods represented by them still face many limitations and challenges in clinical application. For example, metagenomic sequencings have some problems, such as the tedious detection process, data quality control and standardization, distinguishing pathogenic pathogens from colonized pathogens, and effectively evaluating drug resistance and virulence-related factors. On the other hand, the CRISPR-Cas method is faced with technical challenges such as stability, simplicity, diversity of targets, etc. These problems need a lot of applied clinical research to evaluate and solve.

At present, approaches for genome-based pathogen surveillance, including sequencing and Point-of-care testing (POCT or bedside testing), are developing rapidly, which has become an essential supplement to traditional pathogen detection methods such as microbial culture. First, however, we need to fully understand the strengths, weaknesses, clinical application scope, future optimization paths, and possible clinical challenges of these novel pathogen molecular diagnosis methods through the application data and clinical correlation data in different clinical scenarios.

This research topic welcomes original research, methods, review articles that focus on the characters, clinical applications, advantages and challenges of all aspects of molecular approaches for pathogen diagnostics. This Research Topic includes, but is not limited to:
• Progression of diagnostic methodology for pathogen or pathogens with different resistance mechanisms
• Sequencing-based applications in diagnostics of clinical infection
• Progression of databases and analysis procedures for clinical application of metagenomics
• CRISPR-Cas based pathogen identification
• Discovery of candidate biomarkers for infection diagnostics

Please note that the following will not be considered for publication:
• manuscripts on diagnostic methods and procedures that only enable pathogen identification but lack benchmarking or validation data with clinical samples
• manuscripts that merely optimize existing diagnostic processes

Keywords: Infectious diseases, Molecular diagnostics, mNGS, CRISPR-Cas based assay, POCT

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