<i>Cutibacterium acnes</i> is Isolated from Air Swabs: Time to Doubt the Value of Traditional Cultures in Shoulder Surgery?
Surena Namdari, Thema Nicholson, Javad Parvizi
Abstract
BACKGROUND: cultures remain uncertain. Next generation sequencing (NGS) is a molecular tool that sequences the whole bacterial genome and is capable of identifying pathogens and the relative percent abundance in which they appear within a sample. The purpose of this study was to report the false positive culture rate in negative control specimens and to determine whether NGS has potential value in reducing the rate of false positive results. METHODS: Between April 2017 and May 2017 swabs were taken during primary shoulder arthroplasty. After surgical time out, using sterile gloves, a sterile swab was opened and exposed to the air for 5 seconds, returned to its contained, and sealed. One swab was sent to our institution's microbiology laboratory for aerobic and anaerobic culture and held for 13 days. The other sample was sent for NGS (MicroGen Dx, Lubbock, TX), where samples were amplified for pyrosequencing using a forward and reverse fusion primer and matched against a DNA library for species identification. RESULTS: . At 90 days after surgery, there were no cases of clinical infection in any of the 40 cases. CONCLUSION: and CNS) during revision shoulder arthroplasty are also the two most commonly cultured organisms from negative control specimens. Contamination can come from air in the operating room or laboratory contamination.