Genomics in Infectious Diseases

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

For the effective care, rehabilitation, and protection of patients, recognizing and characterizing microorganisms that cause infection are essential.In the diagnostic laboratory, however, not all bacterial species can be cultured successfully.Genomics and whole-genome sequencing (WGS) can greatly enhance human knowledge and understanding of infectious diseases.The ability to assess the microbial community without the need to culture the species has created the ever-growing field of metagenomics and microbiome analysis.Currently, the principal possible applications of WGS in the diagnostic microbiology laboratory for characterizing bacterial pathogen are identification, typing, detection of resistance, and virulence gene detection.In addition, next-generation sequencing (NGS) has helped understand the genome of SARS-CoV-2 early and provided insight into epidemiology, expansion of COVID-19, early and efficient production of the vaccine.The metagenomic sequencing (mNGS) microbial cell-free DNA testing for infection diagnosis is gaining traction.More specifically, for clinicians and specialists in the clinical microbiology community, paradigm shifts in understanding molecular diagnostics are required.A comprehensive clinical review should complement NGS's diagnostic study, which (a) demonstrates clinical effectiveness, (b) guides the use, and (c) exposes possible fields of misunderstood use.Both conventional culture-based technologies and molecular diagnostics have several strengths and limitations.