Metabarcoding approach to identify bacterial community profiling related to nosocomial infection and bacterial trafficking-routes in hospital environments

ABSTRACT

Nosocomial infections (NIs) appear in patients under medical care in the hospital. The surveillance of the bacterial communities employing high-resolution 16S rRNA profiling, known as metabarcoding, represents a reliable method to establish factors that may influence the composition of the bacterial population during NIs. The present study aimed to utilize high-resolution 16S rRNA profiling to identify high bacterial diversity by analyzing 11 inside and 10 outside environments from the General Hospital of Ribeirão Preto Medical School, Brazil. Our results identified a high bacterial diversity, and among these, the most abundant bacterial genera linked to NIs were Cutibacterium, Streptococcus, Staphylococcus, and Corynebacterium. A Acinetobacter was detected in cafeterias, bus stops, and adult and pediatric intensive care units (ICUs). Data suggest an association between transport and alimentation areas proximal to the hospital ICU environment. Interestingly, the correlation and clusterization analysis showed the potential of the external areas to directly influence the ICU pediatric department microbial community, including the outpatient’s clinic, visitor halls, patient reception, and the closest cafeterias. Our results demonstrate that high-resolution 16S rRNA profiling is a robust and reliable tool for bacterial genomic surveillance. In addition, the metabarcoding approach might help elaborate decontamination policies, and consequently reduce NIs.

KEYWORDS:

• nosocomial infections
• microbiome
• bacterial trafficking-routes
• metabarcoding
• hospital environment

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the help and support from the HCRP to provide the infection data. Also, we thank the course of biomedical science and coordinators at Ribeirão Preto Medical School that allowed and supported this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15287394.2023.2243978.

Additional information

Funding

This work was financed by The National Council for Scientific and TechnologicalDevelopment (CNPq), grant 465539/2014-9, 800605/2018-7, and 406442/2022-3; and São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), grant 2013/08135-2, 2017/23205-8, 2018/11705-9, 2018/24069-3, 2019/08528-0, and 2020/02939-6.