The field of lipidomics focuses upon the non-targeted analysis of lipid composition, the process of which follows similar routines to those applied in conventional metabolic profiling, however lipidomics differs with respect to the sample preparation steps and chosen analytical platform applied to the sample analysis.

In this paper, we demonstrate that Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy is able to discriminate rapidly between uropathogenic Escherichia coli (UPEC) of key lineages with only relatively simple sample preparation. A total of 95 bacteria from six different epidemiologically important multilocus sequence types (ST10, ST69, ST95, ST73, ST127 and ST131) were used in this project and principal component-discriminant function analysis (PC-DFA) of these samples produced clear separate clustering of isolates, based on the ST.