Identification of Propionibacteria to the species level using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and artificial neural networks.

Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and artificial neural networks (ANN's) were used to identify species of Propionibacteria strains. The aim of the study was to improve the methodology to identify species of Propionibacteria strains, in which the differentiation index D, calculated based on Pearson's correlation and cluster analyses were used to describe the correlation between the Fourier transform infrared spectra and bacteria as molecular systems brought unsatisfactory results. More advanced statistical methods of identification of the FTIR spectra with application of artificial neural networks (ANN's) were used. In this experiment, the FTIR spectra of Propionibacteria strains stored in the library were used to develop artificial neural networks for their identification. Several multilayer perceptrons (MLP) and probabilistic neural networks (PNN) were tested. The practical value of selected artificial neural networks was assessed based on identification results of spectra of 9 reference strains and 28 isolates. To verify results of isolates identification, the PCR based method with the pairs of species-specific primers was used. The use of artificial neural networks in FTIR spectral analyses as the most advanced chemometric method supported correct identification of 93% bacteria of the genus Propionibacterium to the species level.