Health monitoring of biomaterials from molecular fingerprints

Structural changes in proteins may result in interactions between proteins themselves or between proteins and other biomolecules, which in turn may introduce deterioration of the health state of the system, might it be biological or biomimetic. The initial structural changes in proteins can not be observed by established methods of material analysis like X-ray diffraction or NMR spectroscopy, because proteins in biological cells have an extremely low abundance and are in the non-crystalline state. An obvious gap exists between sequencing techniques for amino acids and the molecular understanding of the functional properties of a particular protein. Vibrational spectroscopic methods offer the potential of fast and accurate characterization of essential supramolecular properties in the native state of the biomaterial. Imaging techniques recently became available for both FTIR and Raman spectroscopy. Here we report on the utilization of the enormous information content of FTIR and Raman spectra for health monitoring in engineering and medicine.