Abstracts

Raman spectroscopy offers a promising technique for rapid and non-destructive analysis in several domain of applications. The main approaches showing the use of Raman spectroscopy as biosensor will be presented in this study. Some examples of application have been selected to show the ability of Raman spectroscopy to identify the toxic effects of effluents on living cells and its potential to monitor the physiology of cells under complex environment of production. In all cases, the obtained Raman spectra reflect the molecular composition of the biological samples without any extensive preparation or the use of chemical reagents. Regardless of the advantages offered by this technique, many challenges remain for its field applications. In fact, the analysis of living cells is very complex because microorganisms are evolving continuously over time and their compositions are very depending to the experimental conditions. This characteristic of biological samples induces high variability and a complexity in the obtained spectral information that cannot be explored by conventional methods. Consequently, complex statistical exploration is always necessary to understand the data. Nowadays, the main challenges will be the automation of the whole approach, including the chemometric models, to simplify its use by an unqualified user. Reducing the prices of spectrometers is also very important to help this technology to become widely used and transferred to other biocontrol domains.