Infect Chemother.  2014 Jun;46(2):110-114. 10.3947/ic.2014.46.2.110.

Sternal Osteomyelitis Caused by Gordonia bronchialis after Open-Heart Surgery

• Chang JH
• Ji M
• Hong HL
• Choi SH
• Kim YS
• Chung CH
• Sung H
• Kim MN

• KMID: 2284988
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.3947/ic.2014.46.2.110

Abstract

We report the case of a deep sternal wound infection with sternal osteomyelitis caused by Gordonia bronchialis after open-heart surgery. The isolate was identified as a G. bronchialis by 16S rRNA and hsp65 gene sequencing, having initially been misidentified as a Rhodococcus by a commercial phenotypic identification system.

Keyword

Gordonia bronchialis; Wound infection; Osteomyelitis; 16S rRNA gene; hsp65

MeSH Terms

Osteomyelitis*
Rhodococcus
Wound Infection

Figure

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  Figure 1 Chest computed tomography on the second day of admission demonstrated cellulitis and focal osteomyelitis around the sternotomy site (arrow).

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  Figure 2 Colonies on blood agar showed small, orange colored convex colonies without aerial hyphae after 5 days of incubation (A) and large, wrinkled, orange colored colonies after 14 days of incubation (B). Gram stain of the pathogen from surgical wound tissue culture (×1,000, C).

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  Figure 3 Unrooted tree that showed the phylogenetic relationships of the current isolate (Case 5C467) and closely related Gordonia species. The tree constructed using the neighbor-joining method was based on a comparison of 16S rRNA sequences. The phylogenetic tree was generated using ClustalW and visualized using TreeView. Distances are presented as number of substitutions per site (a scale of '0.1' means 0.1 nucleotide substitution per site).

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