title: The minimizing of fluorescence background in Raman optical activity and Raman spectra of human blood plasma.
abstract: Raman optical activity (ROA) is inherently sensitive to the secondary structure of biomolecules, which makes it a method of interest for finding new approaches to clinical applications based on blood plasma analysis, for instance the diagnostics of several protein-misfolding diseases. Unfortunately, real blood plasma exhibits strong background fluorescence when excited at 532 nm; hence, measuring the ROA spectra appears to be impossible. Therefore, we established a suitable method using a combination of kinetic quenchers, filtering, photobleaching, and a mathematical correction of residual fluorescence. Our method reduced the background fluorescence approximately by 90%, which allowed speedup for each measurement by an average of 50%. In addition, the signal-to-noise ratio was significantly increased, while the baseline distortion remained low. We assume that our method is suitable for the investigation of human blood plasma by ROA and may lead to the development of a new tool for clinical diagnostics.
authors.affiliation: Department of Analytical Chemistry, Institute of Chemical Technology Prague, Technická 5, 166 28, Prague 6, Czech Republic.
authors.forename: Michal
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tatarkovič
authors.forename: Alla
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Synytsya
authors.forename: Lucie
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Šťovíčková
authors.forename: Bohuš
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Bunganič
authors.forename: Michaela
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Miškovičová
authors.forename: Luboš
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Petruželka
authors.forename: Vladimír
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Setnička
mesh_terms: D005453:Fluorescence; D006801:Humans; D009904:Optical Rotation; D010949:Plasma / Q000737:chemistry*; D013059:Spectrum Analysis, Raman / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*