Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy for the Characterization of Filtrate Portions of Blood Serum Samples of Malaria Patients Using 30 kDa Filtration Devices

Raman spectroscopy is a nondestructive tool for initial diagnosis of different diseases by using bodily fluids, including blood serum samples which having high and low molecular weight fractions (LMWF and HMWF) of proteins. The analysis of disease biomarkers is difficult because they mainly consist of LMWF of proteins which is suppressed by HMWF of proteins like albumin and globulin. The main focus of this study is to overcome this problem; 30 kDa centrifugal filtration devices were utilized to separate the filtrate portions of serum of malaria patients which have the marker proteins of malaria with size less than 30 kDa. For this purpose, surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS), using silver nanoparticles (Ag-NPs) as SERS substrate, is used to examine biochemical variations occurring in the filtrate portions of serum of malaria patients to establish an easy and reliable method for diagnosis of malaria. SERS helped in distinguishing serum of healthy individuals from malarial patients on the basis of their characteristic SERS spectral features. The chemometric tool such as principal component analysis (PCA) is used for the analysis of SERS spectra of various classes of 30 kDa filtrate samples. PCA helped in the qualitative analysis of SERS spectra of filtrate portions of malaria and healthy filtrate.