Surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy of bacteria coated by silver

We present a novel method to measure Raman spectra from whole bacteria cells by using Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS). We deposit a silver coat on Escherichia coli and Bacillus megaterium bacteria and measure strongly enhanced (>400,000 fold) and highly reproducible Raman spectra. The spectra are rich but not overly congested, as the surface enhancement is selective to the precise chemical nature of the biochemical molecules, and their proximity to the silver particulate matter. The main bands we observe can be associated with peptides and polysaccharides in the cell-wall and its membrane. The spectra from E. coli (a Gram-negative bacterium) and B. megaterium (a Gram-positive bacterium) are similar in their general form, but differ in detail. The spectrum from a commercial yeast extract is vastly different. This approach can be extended to probe the internal chemical environment within bacteria and applied to the identification of microorganisms also applied to studying other biochemical problems and phenomena, such as biomineralization, heavy metal toxicity, cell-wall structure and others.