New insights into valve-related intramural and intracellular bacterial diversity in infective endocarditis. PONE-D-16-35798

In infective endocarditis (IE), a severe inflammatory disease of the endocardium with an unchanged incidence and mortality rate over the past decades, only 1% of the cases were described as polymicrobial infections based on microbiological approaches. The aim of this study was to identify potential biodiversity of bacterial species from infected native and prosthetic valves using next-generation DNA amplicon sequencing analysis. Furthermore we analyzed and compared the ultrastructural micro-environments to detect the localization and distribution patterns of pathogens in IE.