Bruker complements fast, cost-effective hospital hygiene testing and HAI tracing with NGS reflex testing
At the ESCMID Global 2025 conference, Bruker’s Microbiology and Infection Diagnostics division announced the expansion of its microbiology solutions into Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) applications, with new, research-use only NGS-based solutions in epidemiology and hospital acquired infection (HAI) tracing.
Bruker has entered into a strategic collaboration for NGS bioinformatics applications in microbiology and infectious disease testing with Ridom GmbH. Ridom’s NGS bioinformatics software SeqSphere+ is designed for genomic bacterial strain differentiation, multilocus sequence typing (MLST), core genome MLST (cgMLST), phylogenetic analysis, and real-time clonal and plasmid transmission detection. SeqSphere+ can handle data from various NGS instrument platforms.
The new genomic analysis capabilities are immediately beneficial in hospital hygiene and epidemiological analysis by combining complementary, rapid first-line testing with the cost-effective, short time-to-result IR Biotyper for the detection and rule-out of HAI outbreaks, followed by reflex testing on selected samples by NGS for in-depth phylogenetic analysis. Similarly, important samples can be sequenced after species identification with the MALDI Biotyper to gain genomic insights.
