Making Strides in: Fourier Transform Spectroscopy

Innovative techniques and improvements in instrumentation are expanding the potential of Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) in bio applications and many other fields. Many pharmaceutical applications use FTIR spectroscopy to identify an extremely small black speck of a contaminant in a light-colored tablet. A typical microscope can mask down an area measuring 3 & 3 pm, which is then compared to libraries of known spectra. Shimadzu's IRTracer offers resolution of 0.25 wave numbers, which is useful for analyzing gas samples that require identification of narrow vibrational bands representing different energy states. Klaus Gerwert and colleagues at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany recently demonstrated an FTIR imaging approach called spectral histopathology, which combines FTIR and Raman vibrational spectroscopy systems. The label-free spectral histopathology system automatically discriminates tissues, demarcates cancerous areas and detects characteristic marker patterns in the spectra of body fluids.