As an important part of environmental water quality monitoring, efficient bacterial detection has attracted widespread attention. Among them, LIF (laser-induced fluorescence) technology has the characteristics of high efficiency and sensitivity for bacterial detection. To simplify the experimental process of bacterial detection, fluorescence emission spectra of E. coli (Escherichia coli) and its deactivated controls, K. pneumoniae (Klebsiella pneumoniae) and S. aureus (Staphylococcus aureus), were analyzed with fluorescence excitation by a 266 nm laser. By analyzing the results, it was found that the dominant fluorescence peaks of bacterial solutions at 335~350 nm were contributed by tryptophan, and the subfluorescence peaks at 515.9 nm were contributed by flavin; besides, K. pneumoniae and S. aureus had their own fluoresces characteristics, such as tyrosine contributing to sub-fluorescence peaks at 300 nm. The three species of bacteria can be differentiated with whole fluorescence spectrum by statistically analysis (p < 0.05), for various concentrations of aromatic amino acids and flavin in different bacteria. The experimental results also proved that the inactivation operation did not alter the spectral properties of E. coli. The indexes of fluorescence intensity and FIR (fluorescence intensity ratio, I335~350/I515.9) can be used to retrieve the bacteria concentration as well as for bacteria differentiation using the index of slopes. The detection limit of bacteria is less than ~105 cell/mL using laser induced fluorescence methods in the paper. The study demonstrated the rapid detection capability of the LIF bacterial detection system and its great potential for rapid quantitative analysis of bacteria. This may bring new insight into the detection of common bacteria in water in situ.
Keywords: disease-causing bacteria; fluorescence intensity ratio (FIR); fluorescence spectrum analysis; laser-induced fluorescence (LIF).