ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Med.
Sec. Infectious Diseases: Pathogenesis and Therapy
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmed.2025.1615409
Comparative analysis between digital PCR and blood culture for blood pathogen detection
Provisionally accepted
- Chenggong Hospital, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Abstract：Rapid and accurate identification of pathogens causing blood infections plays a pivotal role in the early diagnosis and management of infections. Digital PCR (dPCR) is a new nucleic acid amplification technology exhibiting high sensitivity for the rapid detection and absolute quantification of multiple pathogens in the blood. Herein, we conducted a retrospective study involving 149 patients with suspected infections and compared the differences between dPCR assay and blood culture in pathogen detection. Blood culture showed 6 positive specimens and 6 pathogenic strains, whereas dPCR assay showed 42 positive specimens and 63 pathogenic strains.The concentrations of positive pathogens detected via dPCR varied from 25.5 to 439,900 copies/mL. Our study demonstrated that dPCR assay has higher sensitivity, shorter detection time, and wider detection range than blood culture in blood pathogen detection, indicating its capability to support anti-infective therapy for patients.
Keywords: digital PCR, Blood culture, pathogen, Infection, Sensitivity
Received: 21 Apr 2025; Accepted: 04 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhao, Yang, Yao, Chen, Zhang, Guo, Zhang and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ling Zhang, Chenggong Hospital, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.