SPEEDY SEQUENCING: University of Münster medical microbiologist Dag Harmsen and his colleagues used the Ion Torrent Personal Genome Machine to sequence the German E. coli strain in just 62 hours. UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL MUNSTER, GERMANY
While attending the American Society of Microbiology meeting in New Orleans in May 2011, University of Münster medical microbiologist Dag Harmsen started hearing rumors about an E. coli outbreak back in Germany. The culprit bacterium seemed especially nasty, and wasn’t a previously known strain. By late July, the outbreak would infect at least 4,000 individuals, killing 50. An unusually high number (22 percent) of patients developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, a form of sometimes fatal kidney damage triggered by a bacterial toxin.
Because his lab was relatively close to the epicenter of the outbreak, local authorities sent Harmsen some of the first stool samples from infected patients. After a colleague characterized the isolates and developed a rapid screening test for the strain, dubbed O104:H4, Harmsen’s lab ...
