Meningitis Encephalitis: a Metagenomics-Based Etiology & Epidemiology Research

Autoimmune encephalitis (AE) is caused by abnormal immune response mediated by autoimmune antibodies of patients, which can be detected by a serial of autoimmune antibodies\[4,5,6,7\]. At present, the traditional infection diagnosis mainly relies on microbial culture method, which has the characteristics of long cycle, high cost, low detection rate and complex detection process. About 30-60% of encephalitis have unknown etiology\[2,3\]. On the other hand, the diagnosis and classification of noninfectious encephalitis mainly depend on the detection of autoimmune antibodies, the scope of diagnosis and differential diagnosis is limited, and the relationship between autoimmune encephalitis and infection factors is still unclear. Metagenomics sequencing (mNGS) is a new method that does not rely on microbial culture and can directly detect pathogenic nucleic acids. It has the characteristics of fast, accurate, high throughput, no preference for different pathogen detection, and can detect known and unknown pathogens at the same time. Nowadays, mNGS is widely used in the field of pathogen detection.