ABSTRACT
We report the first case of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)-associated brain abscess caused by a rare Trichosporon species, T. dohaense. The patient was a known diabetic and had received systemic corticosteroids for the treatment of COVID-19. He underwent craniotomy and evacuation of abscess. The pus aspirate grew a basidiomycetous yeast, morphologically resembling Trichosporon species. The isolate was initially misidentified by VITEK® MS due to lack of mass spectral database of T. dohaense. Accurate identification was achieved by internal transcribed spacer-directed panfungal polymerase chain reaction. The patient had a favorable outcome following surgical intervention and antifungal therapy.
ABSTRACT
More than a year after the COVID-19 pandemic was declared, the need still exists for accurate, rapid, inexpensive and non-invasive diagnostic methods that yield high specificity and sensitivity towards the current and newly emerging SARS-CoV-2 strains. Compared to the nasopharyngeal swabs, several studies have established saliva as a more amenable specimen type for early detection of SARS-CoV-2. Considering the limitations and high demand for COVID-19 testing, we employed MALDI-ToF mass spectrometry in the analysis of 60 gargle samples from human donors and compared the resultant spectra against COVID-19 status. Several standards, including isolated human serum immunoglobulins, and controls, such as pre-COVID-19 saliva and heat inactivated SARS-CoV-2 virus, were simultaneously analyzed to provide a relative view of the saliva and viral proteome as they would appear in this workflow. Five potential biomarker peaks were established that demonstrated high concordance with COVID-19 positive individuals. Overall, the agreement of these results with RT-qPCR testing on nasopharyngeal swabs was ≥90% for the studied cohort, which consisted of young and largely asymptomatic student athletes. From a clinical standpoint, the results from this pilot study suggest that MALDI-ToF could be used to develop a relatively rapid and inexpensive COVID-19 assay.