Fig. 4

BSI-HMGS robustly detects individual pathogen in polymicrobial mixtures. Mixtures of plasmids corresponding to pathogens that commonly appear in clinical polymicrobial BSIs, including dual infections with two gram-positive bacteria (A), two gram-negative bacteria (B), gram-negative bacteria and gram-positive bacteria (C), gram-positive bacteria and fungi (D), and gram-negative bacteria and fungi (E), were detected using BSI-HMGS. Notably, a tenfold concentration difference was applied to the two plasmids in each mixture to verify the BSI-HMGS performance for detecting multiple infections with a distinct load difference. The IC peaks fluctuates though with the same concentration used, which may result from the systematic error caused during the nucleic acid extraction process, amplification, or capillary electrophoresis process, and the IC signal may also competitively affected by other targets in the amplification reaction system. HMGS: high-throughput multiplex genetic detection system; IC: internal control