 Now from the explosive surface of our own planet to the rocky landscape of another world, over to you Fran. That is a right Roma, I am actually here on Mars if you couldn't tell but I am not alone, don't worry. I have some guides here, I've got Samit Mahajan and her Rokie Cook from University of Southampton. So why have we got a slice of Mars right here Samit? Well we've got a slice of Mars to actually explain the technology which we are developing in this part of Enlightenance Program, a large collaboration between Nottingham, Edinburgh and Southampton which is using a technology called Raman Spectroscopy. In Raman Spectroscopy you shine a laser on a material and the molecules in the material start to vibrate and when they vibrate they give off different colors. By recognizing the different colors which is actually the chemical fingerprint you can tell what the constitution of those chemicals are, whether they might be life or they might be disease which I am going to talk about later. Brilliant and this is new technology isn't it with the laser and then like sort of looking at different chemicals and going okay that one's made of this, this one's made of BCD and this one's made of that. That's correct and NASA recognized this technology, it's actually an old technology but reinvented because advancements in lasers, advancements in detection and so on but NASA recognized the importance of it and that's why they have it on their rover currently looking for signs of life on planet Mars. So could we drive your rover? You can absolutely, actually the big rover is a replica of their rover but we have a smaller one to play a game with. This one a little here, okay I'm up for games. Hiroki I've heard you've got a button to press down here. So the real rover will point out just before we play the game. It's modeled after Mars Perseverance using the same Raman technology that is in Supercam and in Charlotte. This was built by our interdisciplinary team so scientists from different disciplines came together so physicists, chemists, biologists, mathematicians, computer scientists to build this rover very similar to the NASA engineers who put together the real thing 140 million miles away. And this is smaller than the one that's on Mars, always at the same size. The real one is the size of a hatchback car. Okay, yeah, yeah. So today we'll drive an even smaller one because the big one's asleep at the moment but you'll be able to go to each of these targets as it flashes around and we'll see if we fire our laser, look at our chemical fingerprint with Raman spectroscopy and see whether life there exists. Brilliant, and this is the controller here. That's it, so you trust me. Oh, you might regret that. Try to run around, hit that button and we'll see whether there's life. We'll look at the chemical fingerprint and see if there's life. Okay, so let's start the game. Oh, the lights move. Alright, I thought it had to be easy with that one. Oh, it was that one. Okay, okay, okay. Go on. Oh no, no, no, too much, too much. Let's wait, let's wait. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Oh, brilliant. Yeah, line up just a little bit more. Oh, no, no, no, no. So close. Back. Very good. Yeah, that's it. Straight ahead. Oh, yes. Press the button. Press the button. Yes. Oh, and it's, yeah. Oh, and it brings up the chemical fingerprint. This is the chemical fingerprint. And this is this Raman spectroscopy. Raman spectroscopy giving us a unique identify telling us whether there's evidence of past microbial life. Brilliant. And then you're using this to sort of draw around people's imaginations and entice them in. But the research that you're doing is over here, isn't it? Absolutely, absolutely. So what? So the chemical fingerprint acquisition, as you just saw, which can happen on Mars, which is happening right now, actually we use that idea to diagnose diseases, diseases much, much earlier than actually the manifest themselves. So we're looking at diseases like osteoarthritis and you see that, you know, there are different fingerprints. This is how the fingerprints look like. These peaks correspond to the vibrations and a spectrum corresponds to the chemical fingerprint. That is absolutely fascinating. So you can use the same technology that they're using with the Mars rover to then analyze the chemical fingerprint of within bones when it comes to osteoarthritis to detect the disease before the person that has it might even know. That's exactly correct. And then you see as you can then do a library comparison with a database and then this is not the only application. That's the fantastic thing about it. Actually, you can apply this on other diseases. We are trying to do it in skin cancer melanoma detection, but it could be applied to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and so on and so forth. So it's really a fundamental discovery and which is having a large impact both in outer space, but also can make a real difference to the lives of people on planet Earth. Absolutely. It's a tool that you can use in many different ways. And to tell us more about this research, I know Roma, you have a guest with you right now. Fran, it looks like you're having a bit too much fun there. So thank you. I'm now delighted to be joined by Amanda Wright from Nottingham to tell us more. Amanda, welcome to the sofa. Thank you. Can you tell us a bit about the project that you're working on? Yeah, yeah. So it's a large project that spans three different universities. So I'm from Nottingham University, as you said, and I've got some colleagues at Southampton and Edinburgh University are also involved. And we're a big multi-disciplinary team. Biologists involve clinicians, computer scientists, engineers, chemists. So we span a really wide range of disciplines. And we're all trying to take on quite a big challenge of trying to image deep inside the human body. So that's the challenge that we're trying to tackle at the moment. And that's a technology that's also used to look for life in outer space like 320 million miles away. So can you tell me a bit about that link? Yeah. So some of the technologies we're using are linked to also what's happening on Mars at the moment. So there's a technology called Raman spectroscopy. And that's being used on the Mars rover to try to identify life on Mars, which is very exciting. And we're using it to try to identify different molecules that are present in the body. So using it, we can identify if somebody's got arthritis, if a tissue is cancerous, if not cancerous. And it's all using that same technology. The word spectrum is associated with light for me. So can you talk us through what spectrum means to you and then what Raman spectroscopy means? Yeah, sure. So you're right. We use a lot of different technologies involving light. So with Raman spectroscopy, you illuminate your sort of material of interest that you're trying to identify with a single wavelength or a single color using a laser. And that laser, all the individual molecules inside the material get excited by that laser and vibrate at different frequencies. And depending on the frequency they're vibrating at, they change the color of the light. So essentially, we put one color in and we look at all the different colors that come back from that material. And all those colors give us a kind of fingerprint or a spectra of what is present in that material. So we can use it to identify at the molecular level what molecules are in the material. So on Mars, they use it to say is carbon present and therefore is life present in this material we're looking at. And we use it to look at the human body to say, yeah, is there signatures of cancer here or is there signatures of arthritis? What's going on? So can you tell me a little bit about maybe how a cancer cell would respond differently than a healthy cell to this particular technique? So it's all about the different molecules that are there and that are involved and how those molecules vibrate. So it lets us identify the different molecules that are present and how they're vibrating in the case of cancerous and healthy tissue, for example. So for joints, we've got some people on the project who are very interested in arthritis and a signature there is how much collagen is surrounding the joint. And that's a type of protein, isn't it? Yeah, so we can use it to say is it present or is it not present and if it's degraded how much is it degraded by and therefore what sort of state the disease is in how is the disease progressing by looking at the collagen being present like you said this protein being present and the structure of it. So is it a diagnostic tool a bit like MRIs and X-rays, for example? Yeah, that's how we plan to use it as a way of diagnosis and the idea is that it's a sort of natural property of the material that you're looking at and I think additional into the material and that makes it quite minimally invasive so we should be able to do it sort of in a way that doesn't sort of cut into the patient or cause any damage to the patient. Or you're not like ingesting dyes or other kinds of things like that. And could you tell me maybe a little bit how it might differ from X-rays or MRIs or CT scans because again, you know, those are forms of radiation, aren't they? And we shouldn't be exposed to some of those forms of scanning too often. Can you talk us through a bit about the different types of scanning and what's great about Raman spectroscopy? Sure, no problem. Yeah, so X-rays, as you mentioned, they're very good at showing up the bones in their bodies, something that we're all very familiar with, but yes, they can be damaging. So you know, when you go to have an X-ray, the technician often has to stand away and you could only have so many in a time. But they've got like a lead apron or something on, isn't it? Yeah, that's correct, yeah. So that's because they're very, very high energy and therefore they can cause some damage. They're using radiation so they can change the property of what you're looking at. So light comes under the form of non-ironising, so therefore it can't, it doesn't have enough energy to cause those changes. So if we choose our light very carefully, we can choose it in a way as not to damage what we're looking at. So that's a really nice benefit over X-ray. MRI again is a great technique, but it's very expensive in the clinic. It's very noisy. Some patients find it quite unpleasant. So we feel there's a real niche where optical techniques can add. And actually it has this really nice property of being able to, in the case of Raman, identify what molecules are present and it also gives amazing resolution. So you can see things much smaller in the body than you can with MRI. You can see individual cells, individual components in cells. So the resolution you get far exceeds X-ray and MRI. So it's got a kind of, it's got some nice benefits to offer in that space. Absolutely, so if I went to the hospital and I was going for, I don't know, Raman scan, what would that look and feel like as a patient? So the technology is kind of working its way to that point. But yeah, it should be something a little bit like maybe an OCT scan that you've had in your eye. That's an optical technique that scans in the body. So yeah, you'd have a light would be shone at the part of the body that you were having your scan and then there'd be some clever sort of sensors and detectors looking at the wavelengths of the light coming back from the sample. History, I'm always so interested in the history of where things come from in science and engineering. So tell us a bit about Raman himself. Yeah, so Raman was an Indian physicist. Yeah, C.V. Raman was his name and he discovered this property of this Raman spectroscopy in this shift in the wavelength of light and he won the Nobel Prize for that discovery in 1928. So yeah, made a very important contribution to science. So quite a kind of 20th century technique really. The fundamentals of the technique have been known about for a long time and it's one of those techniques that's constantly finding kind of new uses and new ways in which we can employ it on Mars or in the body. So yeah, so the challenge at the moment is really this trying to image deep into the human body and we're sort of developing kind of new lasers and new ways of shaping light and some new AI to allow us to do that to get the Raman spectroscopy signal from as deep as possible into the body because that's where it has the applications. That's brilliant and I just think it's wonderful that it's a multi-disciplinary team because for me that's such an important part of science isn't it? Yeah, it's what I love and it's what I enjoy and it's really nice kind of just sharing ideas and you learn something at every meeting so it's fantastic. That's brilliant. Thank you so much for your time and it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.