Project description:Bacterial pneumonia is still a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. One of the reasons for this may be the lack of accurate diagnostic tests that results in delayed identification of the causative agent and subsequent delay in initiating appropriate therapy. Therefore, there is an urgent need for new diagnostic tools for the rapid identification of the causative agent in bacterial pneumonia. Host biomarkers for early identification of etiology agents in bacterial pneumonia could assist in the development of those new diagnostic tools. The existing biomarkers such as procalcitonin and C-reactive protein for diagnosis of bacterial pneumonia are rather unspecific inflammatory markers and are not discriminatory between different infectious pathogens. In this regard, the objective of this study was the identification of host biomarkers which could distinguish pneumococcal pneumonia from staphylococcal pneumonia in an experimental murine infection model using RNA-Sequencing.