2020, Lorenz B., Ali N., Bocklitz T., Rösch P., Popp J.

Bacteria can be harmless commensals, beneficial probiotics, or harmful pathogens. Therefore, mankind is challenged to detect and identify bacteria in order to prevent or treat bacterial infections. Examples are identification of species for treatment of infection in clinics and E. coli cell counting for water quality monitoring. Finally, in some instances, the pathogenicity of a species is of interest. The main strategies to investigate pathogenicity are detection of target genes which encode virulence factors. Another strategy could be based on phenotypic identification. Raman spectroscopy is a promising phenotypic method, which offers high sensitivities and specificities for the identification of bacteria species. In this study, we evaluated whether Raman microspectroscopy could be used to determine the pathogenicity of E. coli strains. We used Raman spectra of seven non-pathogenic and seven pathogenic E. coli strains to train a PCA-SVM model. Then, the obtained model was tested by identifying the pathogenicity of three additional E. coli strains. The pathogenicity of these three strains could be correctly identified with a mean sensitivity of 77%, which is suitable for a fast screening of pathogenicity of single bacterial cells. [Figure not available: see fulltext.]. © 2020, The Author(s).

2019, Rüger J., Mondol A.S., Schie I.W., Popp J., Krafft C.

High-throughput screening Raman spectroscopy (HTS-RS) with automated localization algorithms offers unsurpassed speed and sensitivity to investigate the effect of dithiothreitol on the diatom Phaedactylum tricornutum. The HTS-RS capability that was demonstrated for this model system can be transferred to unmet analytical applications such as kinetic in vivo studies of microalgal assemblages. © 2019 The Royal Society of Chemistry.

2020, Guo S., Beleites C., Neugebauer U., Abalde-Cela S., Afseth N.K., Alsamad F., Anand S., Araujo-Andrade C., Aškrabić S., Avci E., Baia M., Baranska M., Baria E., Batista De Carvalho L.A.E., De Bettignies P., Bonifacio A., Bonnier F., Brauchle E.M., Byrne H.J., Chourpa I., Cicchi R., Cuisinier F., Culha M., Dahms M., David C., Duponchel L., Duraipandian S., El-Mashtoly S.F., Ellis D.I., Eppe G., Falgayrac G., Gamulin O., Gardner B., Gardner P., Gerwert K., Giamarellos-Bourboulis E.J., Gizurarson S., Gnyba M., Goodacre R., Grysan P., Guntinas-Lichius O., Helgadottir H., Grošev V.M., Kendall C., Kiselev R., Kölbach M., Krafft C., Krishnamoorthy S., Kubryck P., Lendl B., Loza-Alvarez P., Lyng F.M., Machill S., Malherbe C., Marro M., Marques M.P.M., Matuszyk E., Morasso C.F., Moreau M., Muhamadali H., Mussi V., Notingher I., Pacia M.Z., Pavone F.S., Penel G., Petersen D., Piot O., Rau J.V., Richter M., Rybarczyk M.K., Salehi H., Schenke-Layland K., Schlücker S., Schosserer M., Schütze K., Sergo V., Sinjab F., Smulko J., Sockalingum G.D., Stiebing C., Stone N., Untereiner V., Vanna R., Wieland K., Popp J., Bocklitz T.

The variable configuration of Raman spectroscopic platforms is one of the major obstacles in establishing Raman spectroscopy as a valuable physicochemical method within real-world scenarios such as clinical diagnostics. For such real world applications like diagnostic classification, the models should ideally be usable to predict data from different setups. Whether it is done by training a rugged model with data from many setups or by a primary-replica strategy where models are developed on a 'primary' setup and the test data are generated on 'replicate' setups, this is only possible if the Raman spectra from different setups are consistent, reproducible, and comparable. However, Raman spectra can be highly sensitive to the measurement conditions, and they change from setup to setup even if the same samples are measured. Although increasingly recognized as an issue, the dependence of the Raman spectra on the instrumental configuration is far from being fully understood and great effort is needed to address the resulting spectral variations and to correct for them. To make the severity of the situation clear, we present a round robin experiment investigating the comparability of 35 Raman spectroscopic devices with different configurations in 15 institutes within seven European countries from the COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) action Raman4clinics. The experiment was developed in a fashion that allows various instrumental configurations ranging from highly confocal setups to fibre-optic based systems with different excitation wavelengths. We illustrate the spectral variations caused by the instrumental configurations from the perspectives of peak shifts, intensity variations, peak widths, and noise levels. We conclude this contribution with recommendations that may help to improve the inter-laboratory studies. © 2020 American Chemical Society.

2020, Placzek F., Cordero Bautista E., Kretschmer S., Wurster L.M., Knorr F., González-Cerdas G., Erkkilä M.T., Stein P., Ataman Ç., Hermann G.G., Mogensen K., Hasselager T., Andersen P.E., Zappe H., Popp J., Drexler W., Leitgeb R.A., Schie I.W.

Non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer affects millions of people worldwide, resulting in significant discomfort to the patient and potential death. Today, cystoscopy is the gold standard for bladder cancer assessment, using white light endoscopy to detect tumor suspected lesion areas, followed by resection of these areas and subsequent histopathological evaluation. Not only does the pathological examination take days, but due to the invasive nature, the performed biopsy can result in significant harm to the patient. Nowadays, optical modalities, such as optical coherence tomography (OCT) and Raman spectroscopy (RS), have proven to detect cancer in real time and can provide more detailed clinical information of a lesion, e.g. its penetration depth (stage) and the differentiation of the cells (grade). In this paper, we present an ex vivo study performed with a combined piezoelectric tube-based OCT-probe and fiber optic RS-probe imaging system that allows large field-of-view imaging of bladder biopsies, using both modalities and co-registered visualization, detection and grading of cancerous bladder lesions. In the present study, 119 examined biopsies were characterized, showing that fiber-optic based OCT provides a sensitivity of 78% and a specificity of 69% for the detection of non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer, while RS, on the other hand, provides a sensitivity of 81% and a specificity of 61% for the grading of low- and high-grade tissues. Moreover, the study shows that a piezoelectric tube-based OCT probe can have significant endurance, suitable for future long-lasting in vivo applications. These results also indicate that combined OCT and RS fiber probe-based characterization offers an exciting possibility for label-free and morpho-chemical optical biopsies for bladder cancer diagnostics. © 2020 The Royal Society of Chemistry.