Seminars Archive

Spontaneous Raman scattering for Biomedical Applications

Abstract
Nowadays the investigation of the behaviour as well as the metabolism of biomolecules on a molecular level has become central to scientific fields such as medical, pharmaceutical and microbiological diagnostics. So far, standard techniques such as optical microscopy, fluorescence spectroscopy and immunoassay have dominated the field of bioanalysis because of their high sensitivities. However, all these methods suffer from a lack of specificity and reveal only little or no molecular information. Raman spectroscopy provides information on a molecular level without labelling the biomolecule. The Raman low scattering efficiency has been resolved by the discovery of surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). As stated before, SERS spectroscopy yields a strong signal enhancement (up to 4-15 orders of magnitude compared with normal Raman spectroscopy signal). In particular, surface enhanced Raman methods offer promising opportunities in biology, medicine and pharmacy and allows studies of the relationship between the structure and function of proteins. Some biomedical and clinical applications will be presented using Raman and SERS spectroscopy; more specifically applications on the characterization of neurological drug, drug-albumin interaction and human whole blood rapid analysis will be showed.