Jay Kitt of the University of Utah explains that his group’s platform for quantitative Raman measurements inside chromatographic particles didn’t come from a search for signal enhancement. It grew out of a decade of chromatography and biochemistry research.
In this interview clip, Jay Kitt, a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Utah, describes how his group’s approach to
The foundation was laid by a student who preceded Kitt in the group and was studying chromatographic processes inside
Kitt later built on this foundation by forming hybrid bilayer interfaces inside the particles, pairing a C18 lower leaflet with a phospholipid upper leaflet. The group used these structures to measure the lipophilicity of small molecules, and Kitt began considering how the method might extend into biochemistry. Subsequent studies examined antibodies and peptides inside the particles.
The shift in framing came roughly a decade into that biological work, when another student in the group suggested that, because the team was already using the technique as a platform, it should be presented as one. In all, the group did not publish a paper positioning the method as an alternative to surface-enhanced approaches until about 10 years after the work began.
Kitt notes the approach addresses several limitations associated with surface enhancement. It provides a quantitative response, and that response does not depend on a molecule’s distance from the interface or on its orientation relative to it. He calls these features “really neat,” while stressing that solving a specific problem with surface-enhanced methods was never the original goal.
