Identification of single bacteria using micro Raman spectroscopy

We present Raman micro-spectroscopic measurements of Escherichia coli, Bacillus thuringiensis and Staphylococcus cohnii. Several authors have reported successful methods for classifying single bacteria using Raman micro-spectroscopy. The aim of this paper is to evaluate which features of the spectra are useful for the classification. PCA obtained the best performance with 3 PCs. We also tested classifiers based on two and three narrow band filters chosen by exhaustive search. These gave accuracy comparable or greater than that of the PCA based classifier.