“…In recent years, a technique known as direct bacterial profiling has increasingly been applied to dissect proteome for bacterial species identification via the matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization–time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) [ 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 ]. A sufficient number of stable mass signals of major housekeeping proteins, such as ribosomal proteins, are reproducibly detected for bacterial species identification by using simple mass pattern-matching approaches or more sophisticated algorithms to compare and estimate the similarities between spectra [ 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 ]. These characteristic mass profiles (patterns) were successfully applied to bacterial subtyping at the species level, but hardly recognized the serovar level (i.e., the H and O antigen levels) [ 19 ] due to their bias toward small ribosomal proteins with a limited range of 2−20 kDa.…”