Raman spectroscopic signature of life in a living yeast cell

Abstract

We have discovered a Raman spectroscopic signature that sharply reflects the metabolic activity of a mitochondrion in a living yeast cell. Raman mapping experiments on a GFP-labeled yeast cell showed that this signature originated exclusively from mitochondria. Addition of KCN caused a rapid decrease and subsequent disappearance of the signature followed by gradual changes of the phospholipid Raman bands, indicating that respiration was first inhibited by KCN and then lowered metabolic activity gradually deteriorated the double-membrane structure of a mitochondrion. We can now monitor the life and death of a single cell by time-and space-resolved Raman spectroscopy.

Molecular component distribution imaging of living cells by multivariate curve resolution analysis of space-resolved Raman spectra

“…In the past two decades, a number of publications have shown the successful application of Raman microspectroscopy to label-free molecular-level analysis of living cells and to discrimination of cell types. [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] Although Raman spectra contain rich information on molecular structure, detailed interpretation of measured spectra is often difficult because of their complexity. Each Raman spectrum obtained from space-resolved mapping measurements is usually interpreted as a superposition of several spectral components of biomolecules, as well as a background and fluorescence.…”

Chemotaxonomic Identification of Single Bacteria by Micro-Raman Spectroscopy: Application to Clean-Room-Relevant Biological Contaminations

“…Other papers have reported Raman and SERS investigations of single yeast cells, bacteria, or spores (1,10,21,(60)(61)(62). Various investigations of cell components of single bacteria or spores by means of Raman spectroscopy have also been reported (16,20,22,40,50,51). In this paper we describe, to the best of our knowledge for the first time, a fast, nondestructive, and very reliable approach to the identification of bacteria on a single-microparticle level by means of a combination of a micro-Raman analysis together with a data classification approach, the so-called support vector machine (SVM) technique.…”

Multifocus confocal Raman microspectroscopy for fast multimode vibrational imaging of living cells

“…The Raman bands at 1446, 1583, and 1655 cm −1 are assigned to the CH bend, the porphyrin in-plane C═C stretch mode of the porphyrin skeleton of cytochrome c [9], and the superposition of the cis-C═C stretch of unsaturated lipid chains and the amide I mode of proteins, respectively. The 1602 cm −1 Raman band, called the "Raman spectroscopic signature of life" by us, sharply reflects the metabolic activity of a living cell [10,11]. simultaneously Raman imaged.…”