Single-Cell Omics in Noninvasive Diagnosis and Testing—Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy-Based Approach

Abstract Noninvasive methods of diagnosis help to minimize the additional complications or stress on patients and can even hasten the overall diagnosis as well as the curing period. Analyzing samples without destruction can also help researchers understand intracellular processes in their native environments. Innovative approaches are taken to develop smarter methods to understand the biochemical processes from single molecule to their proteome, genome, and even epigenome at a single-cell level. Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS), a mode of Raman spectroscopy, is one of these innovative techniques that has started to gain attention for clinical applications for noninvasive in vivo and in vitro testing. This chapter discusses the drawbacks of invasive testing and diagnosis methods, followed by the advantages of the commonly used noninvasive approaches. The pros and cons of newly developed single-cell omics approaches will be explored. SERS will be introduced as a promising technique for clinics, and then SERS-based single-cell analysis will be discussed in detail.