Unveiling Microbial Diversity: Raman Spectroscopy’s Discrimination of Clostridium and Related Genera

In the clinical environment, the identification of phylogenetic closely related genera and species like Clostridium and Bacillus spp. is challenging. Both genera contain representatives of pathogenic and nonpathogenic species that need to be distinguished for a proper diagnostic read-out. Therefore, reliable and accurate detection methods must be employed for the correct identification of these genera and species. Despite their high pathogenicity, clostridial infections and food contaminations present significant challenges due to their unique cultivation conditions and developmental needs. Therefore, in many diagnostic protocols, the toxins are used for microbiological documentation. However, the applied laboratory methods suffer in accuracy, sometimes require large bacterial loads to provide reliable results, and cannot differentiate pathogenic from nonpathogenic strains. Here, Raman spectroscopy was employed to create an extensive Raman database consisting of pathogenic and nonpathogenic Bacillus and Clostridium species. These genera, as well as representatives of Paraclostridium and Clostridioides were specifically selected for their phylogenetic relation, cultivation conditions, and metabolic activity. A chemometric evaluation of the Raman spectra of single vegetative cells revealed a high discriminating power at the genus level. However, bacilli are considerably easier to classify at the species level than clostridia. The discrimination between the genera and species was based on their phylogeny and not their aerobic and anaerobic cultivation conditions. These encouraging results demonstrated that Raman spectroscopy coupled with chemometrics is a robust and helpful method for differentiating Clostridium species from Bacillus, Clostridioides, and Paraclostridium species. This approach has the potential to be a valuable tool in clinical diagnostics.