Discrimination of Stressed and Non-Stressed Food-Related Bacteria Using Raman-Microspectroscopy.

As the identification of microorganisms becomes more significant in industry, so does the utilization of microspectroscopy and the development of effective chemometric models for data analysis and classification. Since only microorganisms cultivated under laboratory conditions can be identified, but they are exposed to a variety of stress factors, such as temperature differences, there is a demand for a method that can take these stress factors and the associated reactions of the bacteria into account. Therefore, bacterial stress reactions to lifetime conditions (regular treatment, 25 °C, HCl, 2-propanol, NaOH) and sampling conditions (cold sampling, desiccation, heat drying) were induced to explore the effects on Raman spectra in order to improve the chemometric models. As a result, in this study nine food-relevant bacteria were exposed to seven stress conditions in addition to routine cultivation as a control. Spectral alterations in lipids, polysaccharides, nucleic acids, and proteins were observed when compared to normal growth circumstances without stresses. Regardless of the involvement of several stress factors and storage times, a model for differentiating the analyzed microorganisms from genus down to strain level was developed. Classification of the independent training dataset at genus and species level for Escherichia coli and at strain level for the other food relevant microorganisms showed a classification rate of 97.6%.

A New Setup for the Measurement of Total Organic Carbon in Ultrapure Water Systems.

With the increasing demand for ultrapure water in the pharmaceutical and semiconductor industry, the need for precise measuring instruments for those applications is also growing. One critical parameter of water quality is the amount of total organic carbon (TOC). This work presents a system that uses the advantage of the increased oxidation power achieved with UV/O3 advanced oxidation process (AOP) for TOC measurement in combination with a significant miniaturization compared to the state of the art. The miniaturization is achieved by using polymer-electrolyte membrane (PEM) electrolysis cells for ozone generation in combination with UV-LEDs for irradiation of the measuring solution, as both components are significantly smaller than standard equipment. Conductivity measurement after oxidation is the measuring principle and measurements were carried out in the TOC range between 10 and 1000 ppb TOC. The suitability of the system for TOC measurement is demonstrated using the oxidation by ozonation combined with UV irradiation of defined concentrations of isopropyl alcohol (IPA).

Development of Gold Nanoparticle-Based SERS Substrates on TiO2-Coating to Reduce the Coffee Ring Effect.

Hydrophilic surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) substrates were prepared by a combination of TiO2-coatings of aluminium plates through a direct titanium tetraisopropoxide (TTIP) coating and drop coated by synthesised gold nanoparticles (AuNPs). Differences between the wettability of the untreated substrates, the slowly dried Ti(OH)4 substrates and calcinated as well as plasma treated TiO2 substrates were analysed by water contact angle (WCA) measurements. The hydrophilic behaviour of the developed substrates helped to improve the distribution of the AuNPs, which reflects in overall higher lateral SERS enhancement. Surface enhancement of the substrates was tested with target molecule rhodamine 6G (R6G) and a fibre-coupled 638 nm Raman spectrometer. Additionally, the morphology of the substrates was characterised using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and Raman microscopy. The studies showed a reduced influence of the coffee ring effect on the particle distribution, resulting in a more broadly distributed edge region, which increased the spatial reproducibility of the measured SERS signal in the surface-enhanced Raman mapping measurements on mm scale.

Investigation and Rapid Discrimination of Food-Related Bacteria under Stress Treatments Using IR Microspectroscopy.

Because the robust and rapid determination of spoilage microorganisms is becoming increasingly important in industry, the use of IR microspectroscopy, and the establishment of robust and versatile chemometric models for data processing and classification, is gaining importance. To further improve the chemometric models, bacterial stress responses were induced, to study the effect on the IR spectra and to improve the chemometric model. Thus, in this work, nine important food-relevant microorganisms were subjected to eight stress conditions, besides the regular culturing as a reference. Spectral changes compared to normal growth conditions without stressors were found in the spectral regions of 900-1500 cm-1 and 1500-1700 cm-1. These differences might stem from changes in the protein secondary structure, exopolymer production, and concentration of nucleic acids, lipids, and polysaccharides. As a result, a model for the discrimination of the studied microorganisms at the genus, species and strain level was established, with an accuracy of 96.6%. This was achieved despite the inclusion of various stress conditions and times after incubation of the bacteria. In addition, a model was developed for each individual microorganism, to separate each stress condition or regular treatment with 100% accuracy.

Rapid detection and discrimination of food-related bacteria using IR-microspectroscopy in combination with multivariate statistical analysis.

Spoilage microorganisms are of great concern for the food industry. While traditional culturing methods for spoilage microorganism detection are laborious and time-consuming, the development of early detection methods has gained a lot of interest in the last decades. In this work a rapid and non-destructive detection and discrimination method of eight important food-related microorganisms (Bacillus subtilis DSM 10, Bacillus coagulans DSM 1, Escherichia coli K12 DSM 498, Escherichia coli TOP10, Micrococcus luteus DSM 20030, Pseudomonas fluorescens DSM 4358, Pseudomonas fluorescens DSM 50090 and Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis DSM 5724) based on IR-microspectroscopy and chemometric evaluation was developed. Sampling was carried out directly from the surface to be tested, without the need for sample preparation such as purification, singulation, centrifugation and washing steps, as an efficient and inexpensive blotting technique using the sample carrier. IR spectra were recorded directly after the blotting from the surface of the sample carrier without any further pretreatments. A combination of data preprocessing, principal component analysis and canonical discriminant analysis was found to be suitable. The spectral range from 400 to 1750 cm-1 of the IR-microspectrosopic data was determined to be highly sensitive to the time after incubation and sample thickness, resulting in a high standard deviation. Therefore, this area was excluded from the evaluation in favor of the meaningfulness of the chemometric model and, thus, only the spectral range of specific -CH/-NH/-OH excitations (2815-3680 cm-1) was used for model development. This study showed that the differentiation of food-related microorganisms on genera, species and strain level is feasible. A leave-one-out cross-validation of the training data set showed 100% accuracy. The classification of the ungrouped test data showed with an accuracy of 94.5% that, despite the large biological variance of the analytes such as different times after incubation and the presented sampling (including its variance), a robust and meaningful model for the differentiation of food-related bacteria could be developed by data preprocessing and subsequent chemometric evaluation.

Quantitative volatile organic compound sensing with liquid crystal core fibers.

Polymer fibers with liquid crystals (LCs) in the core have potential as autonomous sensors of airborne volatile organic compounds (VOCs), with a high surface-to-volume ratio enabling fast and sensitive response and an attractive non-woven textile form factor. We demonstrate their ability to continuously and quantitatively measure the concentration of toluene, cyclohexane, and isopropanol as representative VOCs, via the impact of each VOC on the LC birefringence. The response is fully reversible and repeatable over several cycles, the response time can be as low as seconds, and high sensitivity is achieved when the operating temperature is near the LC-isotropic transition temperature. We propose that a broad operating temperature range can be realized by combining fibers with different LC mixtures, yielding autonomous VOC sensors suitable for integration in apparel or in furniture that can compete with existing consumer-grade electronic VOC sensors in terms of sensitivity and response speed.

Differentiation of meat-related microorganisms using paper-based surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy combined with multivariate statistical analysis.

Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) with subsequent chemometric evaluation was performed for the rapid and non-destructive differentiation of seven important meat-associated microorganisms, namely Brochothrix thermosphacta DSM 20171T, Pseudomonas fluorescens DSM 4358, Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica sv. Enteritidis DSM 14221, Listeria monocytogenes DSM 19094, Micrococcus luteus DSM 20030T, Escherichia coli HB101 and Bacillus thuringiensis sv. israelensis DSM 5724. A simple method for collecting spectra from commercial paper-based SERS substrates without any laborious pre-treatments was used. In order to prepare the spectroscopic data for classification at genera level with a subsequent chemometric evaluation consisting of principal component analysis and discriminant analysis, a data pre-processing method with spike correction and sum normalisation was performed. Because of the spike correction rather than exclusion, and therefore the use of a balanced data set, the multivariate analysis of the data is significantly resilient and meaningful. The analysis showed that the differentiation of meat-associated microorganisms and thereby the detection of important meat-related pathogenic bacteria was successful on genera level and a cross-validation as well as a classification of ungrouped data showed promising results, with 99.5% and 97.5%, respectively.

Identification of Anoplophora glabripennis (Moschulsky) by its emitted specific volatile organic compounds.

Explorative experiments were done to figure out differences in the emission of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) of not infested trees and trees infested by Anoplophora glabripennis (Asian longhorn beetle, ALB), a quarantine pest. Therefore, VOCs from some native insect species, Anoplophora glabripennis infested Acer, stressed Acer, healthy Acer, Populus and Salix were obtained by enrichment on adsorbents. Qualitative analysis was done by thermal desorption gas chromatography coupled with a mass selective detector (TD-GC/MS). Altogether 169 substances were identified. 11 substances occur from ALB infested or mechanically damaged trees i.e. stressed trees, but not from healthy trees. (+)-Cyclosativene, (+)-α-longipinene, copaene and caryophyllene are detectable only from ALB-infested Acer not from mechanically damaged or healthy Acer. However, these substances are also emitted by healthy Salix. 2,4-Dimethyl-1-heptene is among all tree samples exclusively present in the ambience of ALB-infested trees. It´s rarely detectable from native insect species' samples.

In vitro discrimination and classification of Microbial Flora of Poultry using two dispersive Raman spectrometers (microscope and Portable Fiber-Optic systems) in tandem with chemometric analysis.

Discrimination and classification of eight strains related to meat spoilage and pathogenic microorganisms commonly found in poultry meat were successfully carried out using two dispersive Raman spectrometers (Microscope and Portable Fiber-Optic systems) in combination with chemometric methods. Principal components analysis (PCA) and multi-class support vector machines (MC-SVM) were applied to develop discrimination and classification models. These models were certified using validation data sets which were successfully assigned to the correct bacterial species and even to the right strain. The discrimination of bacteria down to the strain level was performed for the pre-processed spectral data using a 3-stage model based on PCA. The spectral features and differences among the species on which the discrimination was based were clarified through PCA loadings. In MC-SVM the pre-processed spectral data was subjected to PCA and utilized to build a classification model. When using the first two components, the accuracy of the MC-SVM model was 97.64% and 93.23% for the validation data collected by the Raman Microscope and the Portable Fiber-Optic Raman system, respectively. The accuracy reached 100% for the validation data by using the first eight and ten PC's from the data collected by Raman Microscope and by Portable Fiber-Optic Raman system, respectively. The results reflect the strong discriminative power and the high performance of the developed models, the suitability of the pre-processing method used in this study and that the low accuracy of the Portable Fiber-Optic Raman system does not adversely affect the discriminative power of the developed models.

Detection of spoilage associated bacteria using Raman-microspectroscopy combined with multivariate statistical analysis.

Raman-Microspectroscopy with subsequent chemometric evaluation was used for the rapid and non-destructive differentiation of seven important spoilage related microorganisms, namely Brochothrix thermosphacta DSM 20171, Pseudomonas fluorescens DSM 4358, Pseudomonas fluorescens DSM 50090, Micrococcus luteus, Escherichia coli HB101, Escherichia coli TOP10 and Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis DSM 5724. Therefore fast collected spectra directly from rapid surface blots without any pretreatments like purification or singulation steps were used. To estimate and classify the Raman-spectroscopic data at genera and strain level an adequate preprocessing together with a subsequent chemometric evaluation consisting of principal component analysis and discriminant analysis was used. Thereby, importance was attached to a balanced data set, as this makes the multivariate analysis of the data significantly more resilient and meaningful. The analysis showed that the differentiation of spoilage related microorganisms on genera and strain level was successful and the classification of independent test data showed only an error rate of 3.5%.