Beyond the colony-forming-unit: Rapid bacterial evaluation in Osteomyelitis

Examination of bacteria/host cell interactions is important for understanding the aetiology of many infectious diseases. The colony-forming-unit (CFU) has been the standard for quantifying bacterial burden for the past century, however, this suffers from low sensitivity and is dependent on bacterial culturability in vitro. Our data demonstrate the discrepancy between the CFU and bacterial genome copy number in an osteomyelitis-relevant co-culture system and we confirm diagnosis and quantify bacterial load in clinical bone specimens. This study provides insight into improving the quantification of bacterial burden in such cases., The DNA sequences were generated by Oxford Nanopore sequencing platform, using the PCR amplicons following the enrichment of bacterial signal from total DNA isolated from clinical bone specimens., , # Beyond the Colony-Forming-Unit: Rapid Bacterial Evaluation in Osteomyelitis

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.s4mw6m9f5](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.s4mw6m9f5)

The DNA sequences were generated by Oxford Nanopore sequencing platform related to the bacterial presence of 3 prothethic joint infection (PJI) patients. The DNA materials for input to sequencing were PCR amplicons by bacterial targeted PCRs using the total genomic DNA isolated from the clinical bone specimens from those 3 PJI patients. Inside the .zip file, there are three folders, namely PJI 1-3, which are correlated to sequencing results from the three PJI patients (PJI I-III) in figure 3 in our paper. Sequencing results were analysed by the onboard module \"what-in-my-port\" provided by Oxford Nanopore.