LAUSR

Shigellosis is one of the major public health concerns in developing and low-income countries caused by four species of Shigella. There is an apparent need to develop rapid, cost-effective, sensitive and specific methods for differentiation of Shigella species to be used in outbreaks and health surveillance systems. We developed a sensitive and specific Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) based method followed by principal component analysis (PCA) and hierarchical clustering analysis (HCA) assays to differentiate four species of Shigella isolates from stool samples. The FTIR based method was evaluated by differentiation of 91 Shigella species from each other in clinical samples using both gold standards (culture-based and agglutination methods) and developed FTIR assay; eventually, the sensitivity and specificity of the developed method were calculated. In summary, four distinct FTIR spectra associated with four species of Shigella were obtained with wide variations in three definite regions, including 1800–1550 cm−1, 1550–1100 cm−1, and 1100–800 cm−1 distinguish these species from each other. In this study, we found the FTIR method followed by PCA analysis with specificity, sensitivity, differentiation error and correct differentiation rate values of 100, 100, 0 and 100%, respectively, for identification and differentiation of all species of the Shigella in stool samples.