ABSTRACT
Nowadays, medical diagnostics is efficiently supported by clinical chemistry. Many different human biosamples have been investigated by chemical, biochemi cal, and physical methods to provide information to the physician on the pathophysical state of the patient. Traditionally, infrared (IR) spectroscopy has been one of the most important physical methods in the chemical laboratory, since it plays an important role in the elucidation of structures and in the identification of all categories of compounds. It has also been accepted for the study of biological molecules (1,2) of different categories, such as proteins and peptides, chromo phores, and chromophoric proteins, nucleic acids, carbohydrates, lipids, and bio membranes, as presented within a recent conference (3). Despite this fact, for many years the application of IR spectroscopy to clinical chemistry was only rudimentary. One field of early application worth being mentioned was the analy sis of urinary calculi based on the KBr pellet technique (4). A previous review (5) marked the entry of IR spectroscopy for the quantitative analysis of biofluids, of which whole blood and blood fluids are of greatest importance. An obstacle to the analysis of biofluids was the high water content in such samples, so new, emerging techniques, such as attenuated total reflectance (ATR), or the exploita tion of near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy were necessary to access high-quality spectral data from such specimens, leading to a new dimension in clinical chem istry.
