SERS of whole-cell bacteria and trace levels of biological molecules

Surface‐enhanced Raman spectroscopy of bacteria: the effect of excitation wavelength and chemical modification of the colloidal milieu

“…The media range from metal evaporated on glass or latex beads 24 to an electrochemically roughened metal. 25 This might explain why the previously published spectra all differ from each other and from our spectra.…”

“…We do not understand the reason for these differences, in the light of the many different preparation conditions we utilized, as reported here, and which gave mutually consistent results. The use of excitation at 632, 23 647 24 and 784 nm 22,25 cannot explain this disagreement.…”

“…However, even a comparison of the spectra of the same bacterium measured by different groups (e.g. E. coli as measured by Javis and Goodacre, 22 Sockalingum et al, 23 Jones et al 24 and Guzilian et al 25 ) often shows very different spectra. These differences appear to be related to differences in the experimental conditions (preparation protocols for the bacteria and colloids, excitation wavelengths, etc.).…”

Quantification of Chemotaxis-Related Alkane Accumulation in Acinetobacter baylyi Using Raman Microspectroscopy

“…It has been well developed to identify bacteria and study their responses to their environment [34][35][36][37] . Most spectrally-identified biological molecules are well characterized, such as purine, pyrimidine, amino acids and proteins [38][39][40][41][42] .…”

Rapid Analysis of Microbiological Systems Using SERS

“…However, enhancement methods such as SERS will provide a solution to this problem. Several investigations into SERS of bacteria have been undertaken [21,22,23,24,25], and more recently it has been shown that SERS can reliably differentiate between different bacteria [26,27]. There is also much interest in detecting aerosols of spore-forming pathogens, with the obvious target being the identification of Bacillus anthracis.…”