Integration of NGS in clinical and public health microbiology workflows: applications, compliance, quality considerations

Book excerpt: The expansion of NGS implementation in clinical and public health practice accelerated drastically during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, where NGS has been playing a vital role in tracking dangerous strains of the virus. NGS applications not only influenced public health decision-making but also have been crossing into the clinical field with individual patients’ results being potentially available to the physicians. Hence, the topic of implementation of NGS methods in clinical and public health microbiology, its challenges and special considerations, is as timely as ever. The use of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) in clinical and public health microbiology laboratories has been steadily expanding in the past decade. However, this progress has been held back by multiple logistical challenges, like the absence of regulatory compliance framework, lack of clear quality guidelines, the need for standardization and interoperability between laboratories, as well as cost and turn-around-time limitations.