Principal component analysis-assisted fluorescent phenylboronic acid probes for discrimination and detection of living pathogenic bacteria

-means clustering analysis to treat the fluorescence response data. As FITC-APBA showed better discrimination performance than RBITC-APBA, the fluorescent FITC-APBA was further used for identifying the target bacteria in real samples. It is interesting to find that the FITC-APBA-based analytical platform can also discriminate the living bacteria from their dead states, providing a good supplement to the PCR-based bacterial analysis. In this study, a PCA-assisted fluorescent phenylboronic acid-based analytical platform was developed for the discrimination and detection of bacteria in food samples, opening a novel and rapid way for bacterial analysis.