Raman Spectroscopy Studies of Prostate Cancer and Streptomyces Bacteria

This thesis will examine the use of Raman spectroscopy (RS) to probe biomolecular information from
biological samples. The research is comprised of two main studies, a prostate cancer study and a
Streptomyces bacteria study. The prostate cancer study used live cell samples from two different patients
(H517{15 and H554{15), containing normal and Gleason seven cancer cells and two standard cell
lines, PNT2{C2 (normal) and P4E6 (Gleason four cancer). The Raman spectra of each cancer/normal
matched pair were analysed using principle component analysis (PCA). PCA was able to distinguish
the normal cells from the cancer cells for the H517{15 and standard cell line samples. However, the
H554{15 cancer and normal cells comparison proved to be too similar for PCA to separate. Peak intensity
ratio (PIR) analyses were used to probe biomolecular differences between the normal and cancer
cell samples. PIR results for the H554{15 sample showed that the cancer and normal cell samples were
similar. PIR results for H517{15 revealed several biomarkers, which are consistent with the biological
literature on cancer. The PIR results for the standard cell lines suggested that the samples may not be
representative of patient biology due to the PIR biomarkers showing opposite trends to both the H517{
15 primary patient sample, and the literature. The second aim of this research was to assess changes
in lipid content between three samples of Streptomyces bacteria. The three bacteria samples comprised
the wild type (J1929), a strain which had undergone a mutation causing a loss of intrinsic antibiotic
resistance (DT3017), and a treated form of the mutated strain (PDT16). The Raman study in this work
corroborated known biological information about the samples, showing an increase in unsaturated fatty
acid (lipid) content from the J1929 sample to the DT3017 sample, followed by a recovery to the J1929
lipid content, upon treatment, for the PDT16 sample.