Under the One Health program to solve the antimicrobial-resistance problem, a collaboration has begun between the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) and Noscendo, the sequencing and bioinformatics services provider. Through this partnership, Noscendo will be given access to UKB's strain bank; a collection of approximately 8000 antibiotic-resistant pathogens from over 35 species, which has been in operation for 20 years. 

Noscendo's CE certified DISQVER® sequencing and bioinformatics platform will be used to molecularly characterise the organisms stored in UKB's strain bank. The DISQVER platform is currently in a pilot study involving eight maximum-care hospitals where its identification capabilities have been tested, with the UKB being one of these hospitals.

The One Health Working Group who will be working directly with Noscendo and the DISQVER platform are based in The Institute of Hygiene and Public Health (IHPH) at UKB. This group are currently investigating the consequences of the spread of antibiotic-resistant germs through wastewater and liquid manure. 

Since the beginning of the partnership with Noscendo, several clinically relevant resistant microorganisms have been analysed down to the smallest detail and characterised using the DISQVER® diagnostic platform. As a consequence, it was already possible to attribute various outbreak events and incidents to specific bacterial culprits. It was also possible to meticulously retrace previously unexplained cases, where the hitherto unidentified bacterial strains involved had been stored in the IHPH's strain bank.