Data-Driven Infection Control using BugSeq’s Isolate Clustering and Insights¶
Infection control poses a daunting challenge for clinical microbiology labs: pathogens are constantly evolving, and outbreaks can spread with alarming speed. Timely, accurate insights are the key to staying ahead, preventing outbreaks before they happen and rapidly mitigating them when they do. BugSeq’s Infection Control solutions currently help hundreds of labs be proactive about infection control. By harnessing advanced clustering methods and real-time insights, we empower laboratories and healthcare facilities to detect, track, and prevent the spread of infectious diseases more efficiently than ever.
The Power of Whole Genome Sequencing¶
Traditional methods of microbial characterization are often time-consuming and lack the granularity needed to detect and track outbreaks. Combining WGS with BugSeq’s automation cuts through this complexity - going from sample to actionable answer.
Key Advantages:
- Data Quality – Detect and prioritize outbreaks, pinpointing the exact mechanisms of spread
- Ease-of-Use – Upload data and receive user-friendly reports, all without specialized bioinformatics expertise
- Fast Turnaround Time – Get comprehensive organism identification, plasmid detection, antibiotic resistance prediction, and clustering analysis within hours, rather than days or weeks
Let’s dive deeper into how labs use BugSeq for infection control.
Proactive Detection of Outbreaks¶
The BugSeq platform will analyze every new sample against every sample previously submitted, looking for similarities and clusters. This aggregate comparison allows you to:
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Identify Potential Outbreak Clusters: By measuring allelic differences between strains, we help you detect whether two samples are closely related and whether they are part of a new or ongoing outbreak. BugSeq’s published refMLST method is unique because it is the only solution which supports all bacterial species and haploid fungi without the need for a curated scheme.
BugSeq will proactively alert when a submitted sample is similar to existing samples:
Example email notifying that a sample is part of an outbreak
Viewing the report, you can see immediately the cluster implicated:
Excerpt from a sample report
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Monitor Changes Over Time: Track the evolution of specific organisms and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) genes as they spread within or across facilities.
Once an outbreak has been identified, we can investigate the scope and characteristics to build a plan of action.
Visualization that Drives Action¶
Insights are only as powerful as your ability to act on them. We translate complex genetic data into visualizations that empower clearer, faster decision-making:
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Dendrograms: Explore hierarchical relationships in a familiar tree-like structure - perfect for spotting clusters of samples or tracking how a strain has evolved over time.
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Distance Matrices: Compare multiple samples side by side and instantly visualize genetic distances between isolates.
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Metadata: Tag your samples with metadata to dissect data most effectively for your investigation. For example, many labs want to know if outbreaks span multiple facilities or departments.
Track Antimicrobial Resistance Across Host and Plasmids¶
BugSeq’s Insights functionality allows you to quickly find and compare any samples.
Enabling accurate plasmid identification
BugSeq uses a curated database of plasmid, chromosome and gene sequences to ensure highly accurate detection of plasmids and the AMR genes found on those plasmids.
For example, here you can see multiple implicated samples with blaKPC-2 resistance. Note that the samples are different organisms, but we can quickly tell that the blaKPC-2 resistance comes from a common plasmid AA364.
We can then click through to the report for one of those samples and see immediately which drugs are predicted to be resistant.
Putting It All Together¶
Data-driven infection control is about leveraging actionable insights when and where they matter most. By automating the whole genome sequencing workflow to offer intuitive analyses and delivering results within hours, our platform equips labs to prevent outbreaks and mitigate them quickly.
- Improve Outcomes: Early detection and precise strain characterization allow for targeted infection control strategies, protecting patients and limiting transmission.
- Stay Ahead of Resistance: Ongoing monitoring of AMR gene changes ensures you can adapt to new threats with informed antibiotic stewardship.
- Save Time & Reduce Costs: Immediate, automated results minimize labor and prevent costly investigations that can occur when outbreaks go unnoticed.
Take your infection control protocols from reactive to proactive - identifying outbreaks early, preventing transmission, and ultimately saving lives.
Not Sequencing Yet?¶
BugSeq works with a network of sequencing facilities so you can send out your samples to have them sequenced and analyzed through the BugSeq platform. We also offer consulting services to level up sequencing capacity and results.