Jurgen popp’s scientific contributions

During the last 15years, vibrational spectroscopic methods have been developed, which can be viewed as molecular pathology methods that depend on sampling the entire genome, proteome, and metabolome of cells and tissues, rather than probing for the presence of selected markers. First, this review introduces the background and fundamentals of the spectroscopies underlying the new methodologies, namely infrared and Raman spectroscopy. Then, results are presented in the context of spectral histopathology of tissues for the detection of metastases in lymph nodes, squamous cell carcinoma, adenocarcinomas, brain tumors, and brain metastases. Results from spectral cytopathology of cells are discussed for screening of oral and cervical mucosa and circulating tumor cells. It is concluded that infrared and Raman spectroscopy can complement histopathology and reveal information that is available in classical methods only by costly and time-consuming steps such as immunohistochemistry, polymerase chain reaction, or gene arrays. Because of the inherent sensitivity toward changes in the biomolecular composition of different cell and tissue types, vibrational spectroscopy can even provide information that is in some cases superior to that obtained by any one of the conventional techniques.