TIME- AND SPACE-RESOLVED RAMAN SPECTROSCOPY: FROM A MOLECULE TO A LIVING CELL

ionic liquids, living yeast cell Abstract: The future direction and potential of Raman spectroscopy are discussed with an emphasis placed on its time and space specificities. In the last two decades, time-resolved Raman spectrosocpy has been developed and established as a powerful tool for studying the structure and dynamics of short-lived intermediate species1,2. It provides us with a reliable basis for elucidating the elementary physical and chemical processes taking place at the molecular level. Future time-resolved Raman studies will certainly direct to more complexed molecular systems and ensembles (the left-to-right arrow in Fig. 1). It would also be interesting, however, to go directly to the extreme of large biological systems and come down to smaller systems; we are not patient enough to wait until the arrow extends over the gap to reach the other side. We therefore started Raman spectroscopy of living cells and human organs (the right-to-left arrow in Fig. 1). In these studies, only modest time-resolution of second or decasecond is needed but high spatial resolution is indispensable so as to obtain non-averaged meaningful dynamical information. Thus, time- and space-resolved Raman spectroscopy will be the methodology that we need to further develop for studying those large biological systems