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. 2026 Apr 16;16:1796357. doi: 10.3389/fcimb.2026.1796357

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Copyright © 2026 Pi, Lin, Zhou, Liu, Liang, Zhu, Li, Lu, Yang, Chen and Li.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

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Panel A shows a clustered heatmap illustrating the detection of various respiratory pathogens across samples, color-coded by BALF only (red), throat swab only (blue), both (purple), or neither (white). Panel B presents a boxplot comparing normalized pathogen read counts (log10 scale) between BALF and throat swab samples, with means labeled and a statistically significant difference indicated by p < 2e-16. — Differences in the detection of pathogens and microbial diversity in BALF versus throat swab (A) Comparison of pathogen detection between throat swab and BALF samples in 64 children who underwent both tests. (B) Comparison of M. pneumoniae normalized read counts between throat swab and BALF samples from the 64 children.