Spectroscopic investigations of surface deposited biological warfare simulants

This paper reports a proof-of-principle study aimed at discriminating biological warfare (BW) simulants from common environmental bacteria in order to differentiate pathogenic endospores in situ, to aid any required response for hazard management. We used FTIR spectroscopy combined with multivariate analysis; FTIR is a versatile technique for the non-destructive analysis of a range of materials. We also report an evaluation of multiple pre-processing techniques and subsequent differences in cross-validation accuracy of two pattern recognition models (Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Principal Component-Linear Discriminant Analysis (PC-LDA)) for two classifications: a two class classification (Gram + ve spores vs. Gram -ve vegetative cells) and a six class classification (bacterial classification). Six bacterial strains Bacillus atrophaeus, Bacillus thuringiensis var. kurstaki, Bacillus thuringiensis, Escherichia coli, Pantaeoa agglomerans and Pseudomonas fluorescens were analysed.