Application of mid-infrared chemical imaging and multivariate chemometrics analyses to characterise a population of microalgae cells

► Multivariate chemometrics applied to mid-infrared imaging data of microalgae cells. ► Improved leader-follower cluster analysis (iLFCA) selected infrared spectra of cells from data. ► Optical scatter correction algorithm RMieS-EMSC improved the linearity of data. ► Component spectra, concentrations and lipid-to-protein ratio chemical maps obtained.