Monitoring of bacterial drug response by mass spectrometry of single cells.

The application of the laser microprobe mass analyser LAMMA 500 to the solution of problems in the field of microbiology is reported. The special features of this instrument allow the analysis of single bacterial cells, and questions can be answered which are not accessible to the normally applied integral methods. Thus it is possible to establish distributions of, for instance, elemental concentrations within a bacterial population and of correlations between measured characteristics of a bacterium with its morphology. The mass spectrum of a single bacterial cell comprises information on its intracellular cation contents as well as on the organic matrix. The relation between the sodium and potassium contents can serve as a criterion of the physiological state of a cell and of its viability. The information from the organic matrix can be extracted from the complex spectra of fragment ions produced by the interaction of the laser with the cell by applying multivariate data analysis, thus rendering additional information. Examples will be given for in vitro drug screening and in vivo therapy control in leprosy, an infection which is caused by a mycobacterial species, Mycobacterium leprae; this organism does not multiply in artificial growth media so that only limited numbers of organisms are available for microbiological investigations.