FAPRMOL · Flow-aligned polarised Raman of biomacromolecular entities

Existing spectroscopic methods do not provide satisfactory data on structure, orientation and interactions of biomacromolecules in their native environments. This is especially true of membrane proteins, a major class of drug target. The structure of formulated glycoprotein biopharmaceuticals and their interactions with their targets are also a challenge for UV spectroscopies due to extremely high concentrations and the near invisibility of the sugars to UV radiation. Infra red methods suffer from water absorbance dominating the analyte signals. We will therefore develop a new technique called flow-aligned polarised Raman (FAPR) spectroscopy, which will have many of the advantages of existing techniques, including using aqueous environments, while avoiding their pitfalls by using visible radiation. We expect to gain new structural data on the studied molecules using FAPR. The applicability of this method will be verified on membrane peptides and proteins and glycoproteins.