Recognition of Nucleophosmin Mutant Gene Expression of Leukemia Cells Using Raman Spectroscopy

As a label-free, nondestructive, and in situ detection method, Raman spectroscopy analysis of single cells has potential application value in biomedical fields such as cancer diagnosis. In this study, the Raman spectral characteristics of nucleophosmin (NPM1)-mutant acute myeloid leukemia (AML) cells and nonmutated AML cells were investigated, and the reasons for the differences in spectral peaks were explained in combination with transcriptomic analysis. Raman spectra of two AML cell lines without NPM1 mutation (THP-1 and HL-60) and the OCI-AML3 cell line carrying the NPM1 mutant gene were cultured and collected experimentally. It was found that the average Raman spectra of NPM1 mutant and nonmutated cells had intensity differences in multiple peaks corresponding to chondroitin sulfate (CS), nucleic acid, protein, and other molecules. The differentially expressed genes were identified by quantitative analysis of the gene expression matrix of the two types of cells, and their roles in the regulation of CS proteoglycan and protein synthesis were analyzed. The results showed that the differences between the two types of cells expressed by the single-cell Raman spectral information were consistent with the differences in transcriptional profiles. This research could advance the application of Raman spectroscopy in cancer cell typing.