Raman spectroscopy as a tool for studying bacterial cell compounds
Raman spectroscopy is an attractive tool for microbial analysis because of the very small sample volumes needed for analysis, the minor sample preparation and the speed of analysis. Moreover, Raman spectra provide information of all Raman active molecules in the bacterial cell. This technique has already proven to be successful for bacterial identification at the species and strain level. For this purpose, Raman spectroscopy is used as a fingerprint technique. However, these spectra also contain valid information about biochemical composition of the cells. Because bacterial Raman spectra are the sum of signals from all Raman active cell compounds, they are complex. Although in literature some bands have been assigned to (specific or groups of) biomolecules, only very few studies are published where Raman spectroscopy is used to study specific bacterial cell compounds. Therefore, the aim of this work was to develop methods for extracting information from these complex bacterial spectra.
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