This Week in the Journal of Clinical Pathology

In a paper published online in advance in the Journal of Clinical Pathology, Emory University School of Medicine's Ankita Patel Desai and colleagues report their use of MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry to identify bacteria commonly isolated in cystic fibrosis patients. Comparing their mass spec-based results with those obtained using conventional phenotypic and genotypic analyses, Desai et al. found that "time to identification with 47 bacterial isolates from 24 CF patients showed identification of 85 percent of isolates by MALDI-TOF MS at 48 h [hours] of incubation, compared to only 34 percent with conventional methods."

Elsewhere in the Journal of Clinical Pathology, researchers at University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf show that genomic PTEN deletion, while rare, correlates with metastatic disease in gastric adenocarcinoma cases. The team analyzed 230 primary gastric cancers, and of the 180 interpretable primary gastric cancer spots they examined, eight showed PTEN deletions — seven hemizygous and one homozygous. Further, it found that PTEN deletion correlated with nodal and distant metastases.