Application of surface‐enhanced Raman scattering in cell analysis

Abstract

In surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), the scattered intensity is drastically increased due to a resonant interaction with surface plasmons of coin metals. SERS is a nondestructive spectroscopic method applied also to biomedical samples. It inherits the advantages of normal Raman spectroscopy and at the same time overcomes the inherent low sensitivity problem. These properties endow SERS with exciting opportunities to be a successful analytical tool for cell analysis. SERS can be used to detect only molecules located on or close to the metallic nanostructures which can support surface plasmon resonances for the enhancement of the Raman signals. Therefore, these metallic nanostructures play a key role in the application of SERS in cell analysis. By incorporating the SERS substrates into the biosamples, molecular structural probing and cellular imaging become possible. In the past decade, analysts worldwide have developed many schemes to study the chemical changes and component distribution in cells by using SERS. In this paper, the application of SERS in cell analysis is reviewed.

Recognition of Normal and Abnormal Cells through SERS-Active FIB-Fabricated Au Nanoneedle Array Structure

“…The FaDu cells showed lower Raman intensities of nucleic acids, as indicated in the heights at 795, 1000, 1036, 1156, 1190, 1450, 1583, and 1603 cm -1 with compare to the FB cell SERS spectra, Besides the peaks mentioned above, the FaDu cells also showed lower peak heights in the 1603 cm -1 band, which corresponded to the C=C stretching mode of tyrosine and tryptophan [13]- [16]. The reduction in the Raman bands observed suggested that the amount of nucleic acid, protein and lipid could be lower in FaDu cells.…”

“…A pristine Au, control, and NN_1 were used as the detection reference for SERS measurement. The average spectra of FB and FaDu-cells have prominent spectral peaks at 617, 795, 1000, 1031-1036, 1154~1156, 1190~1196, 1326, 1449~1150, 1583, and 1602~1603 cm -1 [7], [13]- [16]. These spectral features arise from the molecular vibrations of cell components such as lipids, nucleic acids, and protein, as listed in Table 1.…”

Identification of waste cooking oil and vegetable oil via Raman spectroscopy

“…It has been widely used in petrochemical engineering, [14] biomedicine, [15,16] geoarchaeology, [17] gem identification [18] and so on. Raman spectroscopy is extremely insensitive to polar materials like water and enjoys a bright application prospect in food quality control.…”

Integrated waveguide and nanostructured sensor platform for surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy

“…These vibrational transitions are dependent on the molecules; therefore, the inelastic scattering can be used to identify functional subgroups of the test molecule. 1 Devices capable of molecular detection are of great interest for many applications including cancer cell detection, [2][3][4] drug analysis, 5,6 and explosives detection. 7,8 Although extremely useful for bulk sample identification, conventional Raman spectroscopy has limited applications as the level of detection of the inelastic-scattered light is very low.…”

“…The benefit of SERS lies with its ability to effectively "fingerprint" chemical species applicable to a wide variety of fields including material science, 12,13 biochemistry and biosensing, [2][3][4][5][6][14][15][16] and electrochemistry. 17,18 The dominant mechanism for most SERS processes is electromagnetic enhancement from the amplification of light by the excitation of localized surface plasmon resonances.…”