Recovery of absorbance spectra of micrometer-sized biological and inanimate particles

In this paper, we first provide an overview of the Mie type scattering at absorbing materials and existing correction methods, followed by a new method to obtain the pure absorbance spectra of biological systems with spherical symmetry. This method is a further development of the recently described iterative algorithm of van Dijk et al. The method is tested on FTIR synchrotron spectra of polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) microspheres and pollen grains with approximately spherical shape. The imaginary part of the refractive index was successfully recovered for both systems. Good agreement was obtained between the pure absorbance spectra obtained by this method and the measured spectra.