Intracellular applications of analytical SERS spectroscopy and multispectral imaging

The aim of this tutorial review is to give an overview of the state of the art of intracellular applications of analytical SERS spectroscopy. We pay particular attention to nanoparticle-based SERS spectroscopy since this currently dominates the published literature on non-disturbing analysis of live cells. We describe recent advances in this domain due to the development of multispectral imaging and to the combined use of SERRS (surface-enhanced resonance Raman scattering) and fluorescence spectroscopy. Finally, a perspective view is given on the tip-based approaches like tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (TERS) which allow micrometric and nanometric resolution.