“…Spectroscopic approaches offer substantial benefits over traditional methods, being inexpensive, quantitative, objective, rapid, high throughput, sensitive and inherently multivariate (Hirschmugl et al, 2005;Heraud et al, 2005Heraud et al, , 2007aHeraud et al, , 2008Jebsen et al, 2012;Sackett et al, 2013). The use of spectroscopic techniques such as Raman and Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy in phytoplankton studies has been widely explored (Heraud et al, 2007b;Heraud et al, 2008;Domenighini and Giordano, 2009;Dean et al, 2012Dean et al, , 2010.…”