Fourier transform-infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) is used to discriminate and identify four food- borne bacteria Escherichia coli O157:H7, Salmonella enteritidis, Staphylococcus aureus and Listeria mono- cytogenes. The representative infrared spectra were adjusted by automatic baseline correction and normalize scale. The spectra are then analysed through first derivative transformation between 800 cm^－1 and 1500 cm^－1 in order to compare the similarities and differences between spectra of the four chosen bacteria. Results show that the minimum correlation coefficients between the bacteria is 0.058, while the maximum is 0.937. The results also showed significant differences between different foodborne bacteria. Moreover, principal component analysis (PCA) and cluster analysis (CA) revealed clear segregations between different bacterial strains. It is concluded that FT-IR techniques have great potential as routine methods in Foodborne bacteria.

Key words: foodborne bacteria, FT-IR, distinction, identification