Although cervical cancer screening in the UK has led to reductions in the incidence of invasive disease, this programme remains flawed. We set out to examine the potential of infrared (IR) micro spectroscopy to allow the profiling of cellular biochemical constituents associated with disease progression. Attenuated total reflection-Fourier Transform IR (ATR) micro spectroscopy was employed to interrogate spectral differences between samples of exfoliative cervical cytology collected into liquid based cytology (LBC). These were histologically characterised as normal (n = 5), low-grade (n = 5), high-grade (n = 5) or severe dyskaryosis (? carcinoma) (n = 5). Examination of resultant spectra was coupled with principal component analysis (PCA) and subsequent linear discriminant analysis (LDA). The interrogation of LBC samples using ATR microspectroscopy with PCA-LDA facilitated the discrimination of different categories of exfoliative cytology and allowed the identification of potential biomarkers of abnormality; these occurred prominently in the IR spectral region 1200 cm(-1)-950 cm(-1) consisting of carbohydrates, phosphate, and glycogen. Shifts in the centroids of amide I (approximate to 1650 cm(-1)) and (approximate to 530 cm(-1)) absorbance bands, indicating conformational changes to the secondary structure of intracellular proteins and associated with increasing disease progression, were also noted. This work demonstrates the potential of ATR microspectroscopy coupled with multivariate analysis to be an objective alternative to routine cytology. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.