Spectroscopy is a well established technique which is already used across many different industries to derive the structural and chemical composition of a sample in any form, solid, liquid or gas.

The atoms in a molecule are always moving. Spectroscopy detects changes in motion caused by electromagnetic radiation absorbed by a molecule. You can identify a molecule from its own unique signature change, called its 'spectrum'.

Biological samples are made up of many different molecules. This makes the spectral information rich but complex because they overlap. Environmental contaminants affect samples too, and no biological sample is completely pure. As a result, it's difficult to split the spectrum into individual components.