Fast identification of pathogenic bacteria is an essential need for patient’s diagnostic in hospitals and environmental monitoring of water and air quality. Bacterial cells consist of a very high amount of biological molecules whose content changes in response to different environmental conditions. The similarity between the molecular compositions of different bacterial cells limits the possibility to find unique markers to enable differentiation among species. Although many biological molecules in the cells absorb at the UV-Vis region, only a few of them can be detected in whole cells by their intrinsic fluorescence. Among these molecules are the amino acids phenylalanine, tyrosine, and tryptophan. In this work, we develop a rapid method for bacterial identification by synchronous fluorescence. We show that we can quantify the concentration for the 3 amino acids without any significant interference from other fluorophores in the cells and that we can differentiate among 6 pathogenic bacterial species by using the concentrations of their amino acids as a bacterial fingerprint. Fluorescent amino acids exist in all living cells. Therefore, this method has the potential to be applicative for the rapid identification of cells from all kinds of organisms.

快速鉴定病原菌是医院患者诊断和水和空气质量环境监测的基本需求。细菌细胞由大量的生物分子组成，其含量会随着不同的环境条件而变化。不同细菌细胞的分子组成之间的相似性限制了找到独特标记以实现物种间分化的可能性。尽管细胞中的许多生物分子在 UV-Vis 区域有吸收，但在整个细胞中只能通过其固有荧光检测到其中的少数。这些分子中有氨基酸苯丙氨酸、酪氨酸和色氨酸。在这项工作中，我们开发了一种通过同步荧光快速鉴定细菌的方法。我们表明，我们可以量化 3 种氨基酸的浓度，而不受细胞中其他荧光团的任何显着干扰，并且我们可以通过使用它们的氨基酸浓度作为细菌指纹来区分 6 种致病细菌。荧光氨基酸存在于所有活细胞中。因此，该方法有可能应用于快速鉴定来自各种生物的细胞。