Capillary electrophoresis in the diagnosis of surgical site infections

A surgical site infection (SSI) is an infection that occurs after surgery in the part of the body where the surgery took place. A SSI may range from a spontaneously limited wound discharge within 7-10 days of an operation to a life-threatening postoperative complication, such as a sternal infection after open heart surgery. Most surgical site infections are caused by contamination of an incision with microorganisms from the patient's own body during surgery. From the analytical point of view the complex natures of these samples as well as the low concentrations of analytes require a system with high sensitivity and efficiency. Such situation require a technique such as capillary electrophoresis which is a powerful and versatile separation technique that promises to rival high performance liquid chromatography when applied to the separation of both charged and neutral species. During the study, it has been demonstrated that CZE identifying characteristics of such groups of pathogens such as bacteria G (+) and different species of bacteria G (-) and also develop weekly individual profiles for patients after application of antibiotics. This was done in order to show the impact of antibiotic therapy in change "numbers" of bacteria present in the wound after surgery. The method proved to be the ideal straight specificity in the case of E. coli (100%). Finally analysis of the spectra and the second derivatives of the UV-Vis spectra confirmed the similarity in the profiles and showed that the CZE is a great method for fast screening test in bacterial infection.