Vibrational spectroscopy in stem cell characterisation: is there a niche?

• We report on vibrational microspectroscopy for noninvasive profiling of stem cells and their differentiation.
• We describe the potentials of infrared microspectroscopy for stem cell characterisation.
• We describe the potentials of Raman microspectroscopy for stem cell characterisation.
• We discuss on the technological barriers to overcome before such techniques could be used in clinical applications.

Vibrational spectroscopy using both infrared and Raman spectroscopies has been used in recent years with the aim to aid clinicians in disease diagnosis. More recently, these techniques have been applied to study stem cell differentiation and to determine stem cell presence in tissues. These studies have demonstrated the potential of these techniques in better characterising stem cell differentiation phenotypes with potential applications in tissue engineering strategies. However, before the translation of vibrational spectroscopy into clinical practice becomes a reality, several issues still need to be addressed. We describe here an overview of the work carried out so far and the problems that might be encountered when using vibrational spectroscopy.