Chronic wounds cause substantial morbidity and disability. Infection in chronic wounds is clinically defined by routine culture methods that can take several days to obtain a final result and may not fully describe the community of organisms or biome within these wounds. Molecular diagnostic approaches offer promise for a more rapid and complete assessment. We report the development of a suite of real-time PCR assays for the rapid identification of bacteria directly from tissue samples.

The PCR assays identified DNA from ten organisms that were not revealed by either qualitative or quantitative cultures.