Rapid diagnosis of pathogens is decisive to guarantee adequate therapy in infections: culture methods are precise and sensitive, but rather slow. New resources are available to enable faster diagnosis, and the most promising is MALDI-TOF technology: mass spectrometry applied to microbiological diagnosis. Times as fast as 10 to 15 minutes to etiological diagnosis are possible after a positive blood culture result. We hope to have this technology in our laboratory, ANVISA permitting and improving their very slow rate of doing things... MALDI-TOF is basically putting a sample of culture or an enriched suspension of the probable pathogen over a small spot with a matrix and vaporizing it with a laser pulse: the products are aspired into a chamber, ionized and reach detectors at variable times: the detectors show time of arrival and quantity of the product, and each pathogen has its characteristic spectrum analyzed by a software.
Spectrometry, mass, matrix-assisted laser desorption-ionization