Raman Spectroscopy

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In the treatment of tuberculosis (TB), a contagious disease that causes 1.5 million deaths per year globally, early diagnosis is critical in order to control its spread. Unfortunately, standard tuberculosis diagnostic tests, such as sputum culture, can take days to weeks to yield results. In a recent paper, Ubaid Ullah of the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering in Pakistan and his colleagues demonstrate a quick, portable, easy-to-use, and non-invasive optical sensor based on sputum samples for tuberculosis detection using Raman spectroscopy to detect TB in a patient’s sputum supernatant. Ullah spoke to Spectroscopy about this sensor and its development.

Karen Faulds of the University of Strathclyde co-authored a paper where SESORS signals could be detected from nanotags at depths down to 48 mm for the first time using a handheld spatially offset Raman (SORS) instrument. She recently spoke to Spectroscopy about this and some of her other papers and the advances in the science that made them possible. Faulds is the 2022 recipient of the RSC Analytical Division Mid-Career Award. This interview is part of an ongoing series of interviews with the winners of awards that are presented at the annual SciX conference, which will be held this year from October 2 through October 7, in Covington, Kentucky.

James Piret, and Robin Turner, of Michael Smith Laboratories (Vancouver, BC Canada) and the University of British Columbia (UBC) have been exploring the benefits of extracting and displaying correlated spectrometric and non-spectrometric variables with a proposed method called multisource correlation analysis (MuSCA). Their work has uncovered several advantages of using Raman spectroscopy for these applications. Here, they discuss their efforts to develop an approach that permitted the integration of diverse biochemical information with measured spectra for co-analysis to characterize the spectra and take advantage of the available spectral information.

Wei Min, of the Department of Chemistry at Columbia University in New York City, and his associates recently published a paper outlining their devising a set of multiplexed Raman molecular probes with sharp and mutually resolvable Raman peaks to simultaneously quantify cell surface proteins, endocytosis activities, and metabolic dynamics of an individual live cell. Min, who recently spoke to us about this work, is the 2022 recipient of the Craver Award, presented annually at FACSS SciX to recognize the efforts of young professional spectroscopists that have made significant contributions in applied analytical vibrational spectroscopy.