Raman spectroscopy of potential bio-hazards commonly found in bio-aerosols.

Pathogenic bio-aerosols are a threat to public health today, and thus quick detection and identification is of paramount importance. In this study, Raman spectroscopy was used to test 14 types of pollens, one type of fungus and two types of bacteria that are commonly found in bio-aerosols. For bacteria and fungus, surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) was used due to their relatively weak signals. Data analysis was performed on the Raman measurement results; principal component analysis was used to reduce the dimension of the data, and support vector machine was used to establish a model for sample identification. The model was able to identify data in the validation set with high (97.3%) accuracy.