Detection and Identification of Candida auris from Clinical Skin Swabs

Candida auris is a recently emerged pathogenic fungus posing an urgent global health threat. Given its propensity to cause nosocomial outbreaks, rapid detection and accurate identification of C. auris have become essential for an effective implementation of infection prevention and control measures in healthcare facilities. Unfortunately, the requirement of culturing a yeast colony from a patient sample, central for most of the available diagnostic tools, results in substantial delays (several days or longer) in diagnosis. However, nucleic acid-based techniques can deliver accurate diagnostic results within several hours since they are based on analysis of DNA extracted from patient specimen (no need of culture). Here we describe a real-time PCR assay protocol which can be applied for C. auris detection and identification directly from patient swabs.