The development of rapid, reliable, and low-cost methods that enable discrimination among clinically relevant bacteria is crucial, with emphasis on those listed as WHO Global Priority 1 Critical Pathogens, such as carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii and carbapenem-resistant or ESBL-producing Klebsiella pneumoniae. To address this problem, we developed and validated a protocol of surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) with silver nanostars for the discrimination of A. baumannii and K. pneumoniae species, and their globally disseminated and clinically relevant antibiotic resistant clones. Isolates were characterized by mixing bacterial colonies with silver nanostars, followed by deposition on filter paper for SERS spectrum acquisition. Spectral data were processed with unsupervised and supervised multivariate data analysis methods, including principal component analysis (PCA) and partial least-squares discriminant analysis (PLSDA), respectively. Our proposed SERS procedure using silver nanostars adsorbed to the bacteria, followed by multivariate data analysis, enabled differentiation between and within species. This pilot study demonstrates the potential of SERS for the rapid discrimination of clinically relevant A. baumannii and K. pneumoniae species and clones, displaying several advantages such as the ease of silver nanostars synthesis and the possible use of a handheld spectrometer, which makes this approach ideal for point-of-care applications.
Keywords: SERS; bacterial differentiation; chemometrics; clones; critical pathogens; silver nanostars; surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy; vibrational spectroscopy.