Researchers at bioMérieux said they've developed a new, quicker and cheaper way to diagnose sepsis. Their method involves destroying white blood cells within a sample, centrifugation to collect bacteria or fungi from the sample and then fluorescence spectroscopy to analyze the fingerprint of pathogens carried by the sample. They said that their approach correctly identified species of bacteria or fungi in 96.5% of positive blood culture samples. The team said that the current approach to spotting bloodstream infections, which includes Gram staining, overnight subculture and then phenotypic ID tests, can be time-consuming, which often prevents quick treatment. Details of their research are published in mBio, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology. Item | Journal article