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Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy and Multivariate Analysis for Elucidating Mechanisms of Action in Antibacterial
Der Vang1, Jonathan Pahren2, Emily Duderstadt2
1Department of Chemistry, University of Cincinnati, 2600 Clifton Avenue, Cincinnati, Ohio 45221, United States.
ACS Sensors
|March 25, 2025
Summary
Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) offers a rapid, noninvasive method to analyze bacterial responses to antibacterial agents. This technique, combined with data analysis, can quickly identify treatment mechanisms and accelerate new drug discovery.
Area of Science:
- Analytical Chemistry
- Microbiology
- Spectroscopy
Background:
- Antibiotic resistance is a growing global health concern, necessitating new therapeutic strategies.
- Traditional methods for determining antibacterial mechanism of action (MoA) are time-consuming and expensive.
- Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) presents a faster, sensitive, and noninvasive alternative for molecular analysis.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the utility of SERS for analyzing the effects of various antibacterial agents on *Escherichia coli*.
- To correlate SERS spectral changes with bacterial viability and identify distinct spectral signatures for different MoAs.
- To demonstrate the potential of SERS combined with multivariate analysis for rapid characterization of antibacterial agent MoA.
Main Methods:
- Treatment of *Escherichia coli* cultures with antibacterial agents exhibiting diverse MoAs (oxidative stress, metabolic disruption, membrane lysis).
- Acquisition of SERS spectra from treated bacterial samples.
- Partial least-squares (PLS) analysis to correlate spectral data with bacterial viability and identify MoA-specific spectral features.
Main Results:
- High predictive accuracy (R² > 0.98) was achieved when correlating SERS spectra with bacterial viability using PLS models.
- Variable importance projection scores from PLS models successfully identified the MoA in data subsets.
- Distinct SERS spectral signatures were observed for antibacterial agents with different known MoAs, enabling differentiation.
Conclusions:
- SERS combined with multivariate analysis provides a feasible approach for rapid characterization of antibacterial agent MoA.
- This method can effectively differentiate between various antibacterial treatments based on unique spectral fingerprints.
- The SERS approach accelerates the discovery of novel antibacterial therapies by offering a real-time, cost-effective alternative to traditional techniques.
