Development of Raman Micro-Spectroscopy to Characterize Human Ovarian Cancer Cells

Raman spectroscopy is a vibrational spectroscopy technique and has demonstrated highly desirable unique analytical capabilities throughout the field of biomedical optics. It has the ability to obtain sensitive measurements of molecular composition and structure from small sample volume in non-destructive, non-invasive and label free manner. This makes it useful in study of the cells and tissues. In this work a Raman micro-spectrometer system was developed and applied in vitro to discriminate between the chemically fixed cisplatin-resistant (A2780cp) and cisplatin-sensitive (A2780s) human ovarian carcinoma cells. Raman spectra collected from individual cells were pre-processed and subsequently analyzed with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) to yield a strong separation between the cell lines. The objective of this work was to characterize the spectral differences between the two cell types in order to determine the underlying biochemical basis for this separation.