This publication highlights the importance of bacterial typing to identify bacterial strains in clinical, industrial, or environmental microbiology. It shows how FT-IR can be used as a method that combines a high reliability and accuracy with a rapid, low-cost, and user-friendly performance and how new developments, such as the disposable IRUBIS Universal ATR Crystal, can contribute to this.
It is demonstrated how FT-IR-based bacterial typing might not only useful for strain typing but could also to help understanding the diversity, evolution, and host adaptation factors of important bacterial pathogens or subpopulations.