Determining terahertz resonant peaks of biomolecules in aqueous environment

The resonant peaks of biomolecules provide information on the molecules' physical and chemical properties. Although many biomolecules have resonant peaks in the terahertz region, it is difficult to observe their specific signals in aqueous environments. Hence, this paper proposes a method for determining these peaks. We found the specific resonant peaks of a modified nucleoside, 5-methlycytidine and modified HEK293T DNA in an aqueous solution through baseline correction. We evaluated the consistency of various fitting functions used for determining the peaks with various parameters. We separated two resonance peaks of 5-methlycytidine at 1.59 and 1.97 THz and for artificially methylated HEK293T DNA at 1.64 and 2.0 THz. (C) 2020 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement