Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering Biosenor for Detection of Hepatitis B Virus DNA

Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) has received increasing attention in biological and chemical sensing because of its unique features. At first, the sandwich nanoparticles have been developed as the SERS Probe.¹ And then the sandwich nanoparticles are coupled with a gold triangle nano-array chip to create spatially broadened plasmonic “hot spots”, which enables a large density of Raman reporters to experience strong local electromagnetic field enhancement.  Such a quasi-periodic structure increases the intensity and area of the localized surface plasmon resonance, which enhances the SERS signal significantly. This nano-architecture has been used to construct a SERS sensor for hepatitis B virus DNA detection. This sensor exhibits the limit of detection as low as 47.6 aM and can discriminate single-base mutant of DNA.

References

[1] M. Li, S. K. Cushing, J. Zhang, J. Lankford, Z. P. Aguilar, D. Ma, N. Q. Wu, Nanotechnology, 23 (2012), 115501.

[2]  M. Li, S. K. Cushing, H. Liang, S. Suri, D. Ma, N. Q. Wu, Analytical Chemistry, 85 (2013), 2072-2078.

Acknowledgement:

The resource and facilities used were partially supported by NSF (EPS 1003907), the West Virginia University Research Corporation and the West Virginia EPSCoR Office. The use of WVU Shared Facility was appreciated.