[bioch3mist]

Hello Group! I'm working on analyzing Raman spectra of proteins. I'm
particularly interested in learning more about the signal processing
of the amide I band. If anyone has any experience with Peakfit program
or Origin, Savitsky-Golay smoothing, or amide I deconvolution for
secondary structure quantification, please help. My boss asked me to
learn Raman because he's interested in monitoring the change in
secondary structure in complex coacervates between protein and
polysaccharide. Hopefully, I can get someone to describe to me what
steps are involved in deconvoluting the amide I band in either peakfit
or origin and why those steps are taken.

[yempski]

Deconvolution is way of determining the component bands under a compilicated peak.  It is generally performed using and iterative minimisation process where initial guesses are fine tuned using something like the Levenberg-Marquardt method.

In your case the amide band is probably composed of a number of peaks and your task is to quantify their relative contribution.