Identification of bacteria by mass spectrometry

• Autor(a) principal: Saraiva, Bruno Manuel Santos
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/14317
• topic: Bioquímica; Bactérias - Identificação; Espectroscopia de massa

Identification of bacteria is a major part of the diagnosis of a pathogenic infection. In order to positively and confidently identify the bacteria, different techniques can be applied. These techniques are based on different principles, such as phenotypic differences, DNA sequences comparison, mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF) and the protein content of the bacteria. From comparison of MALDI-TOF for bacteria identification with the other methodologies available, several advantages can be highlighted: lower cost per identification, faster results and higher discrimination power. This work focus on the development of a new application capable of identifying bacteria using MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry. It started by the protein extraction of the samples and the acquisition of the mass profiles of those bacteria. This work proceeded with the development of an application to identify bacteria by comparing the mass profile of an unknown sample with the mass profiles of the bacteria in our database. Using the developed application it was possible to identify both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria to the strain-level. When an identification to strain-level was not possible, it was possible to identify the bacteria to the species-level and in the case the database did not contain an entry of the same species as the sample, the score values were low enough to disregard a possible identification resulting in a low false-positive rate.