Identification of bacterial species by untargeted NMR spectroscopy of the exo-metabolome

Identification of bacterial species is a crucial bottleneck for clinical diagnosis of infectious diseases. Quick and reliable identification is a key factor to provide suitable antibiotherapies and avoid the development of multiple-drug resistance. We propose a novel nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)-based metabolomics strategy for rapid discrimination and identification of several bacterial species that relies on untargeted metabolic profiling of supernatants from bacterial culture media. We show that six bacterial species (Gram negative: Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Proteus mirabilis; Gram positive: Enterococcus faecalis, Staphylococcus aureus, and Staphylococcus saprophyticus) can be well discriminated from multivariate statistical analysis, opening new prospects for NMR applications to microbial clinical diagnosis.