Laser
tweezers Raman spectroscopy enables multiplexed, quantitative
chemical and morphological analysis of individual bionanoparticles
such as drug-loaded nanoliposomes, yet it requires minutes-scale acquisition
times per particle, leading to a lack of statistical power in typical
small-sized data sets. The long acquisition times present a bottleneck
not only in measurement time but also in the analytical throughput,
as particle concentration (and thus throughput) must be kept low enough
to avoid swarm measurement. The only effective way to improve this
situation is to reduce the exposure time, which comes at the expense
of increased noise. Here, we present a hybrid principal component
analysis (PCA) denoising method, where a small number (∼30
spectra) of high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) training data construct
an effective principal component subspace into which low SNR test
data are projected. Simulations and experiments prove the method outperforms
traditional denoising methods such as the wavelet transform or traditional
PCA. On experimental liposome samples, denoising accelerated data
acquisition from 90 to 3 s, with an overall 4.5-fold improvement in
particle throughput. The denoised data retained the ability to accurately
determine complex morphochemical parameters such as lamellarity of
individual nanoliposomes, as confirmed by comparison with cryo-EM
imaging. We therefore show that hybrid PCA denoising is an efficient
and effective tool for denoising spectral data sets with limited chemical
variability and that the RR-NTA technique offers an ideal path for
studying the multidimensional heterogeneity of nanoliposomes and other
micro/nanoscale bioparticles.