SERS Platform for Dengue Diagnosis from Clinical Samples Employing a Hand Held Raman Spectrometer

Abstract

Dengue is a serious global health concern especially in tropical and subtropical countries. About 2.5 billion of the world's population is at risk for dengue infection. Early diagnosis is the key to prevent the deterioration of health of the patient to severe illness. Laboratory diagnosis of dengue is essential for providing appropriate supportive treatment to dengue patients with febrile illness, which is difficult to diagnose clinically. Here, we demonstrate surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) based diagnosis of dengue virus in clinical blood samples collected from total of 102 subjects. All of the samples were well characterized by conventional NS1 antigen and IgM antibody ELISA kits. The silver nanorods array fabricated by glancing angle deposition technique were employed as SERS substrates. A small amount of patient blood serum (5 μL) was taken for analysis and the report was prepared within a minute. SERS spectra of pure NS1 protein as well as spiked in serum was also recorded separately. Principal component analysis (PCA) was employed as the statistical tool to differentiate dengue positive, dengue negative, and healthy subjects on the basis of their respective SERS spectra. This method provides a sensitive, rapid, and field deployable diagnosis of dengue at the early stage (within 5 days of the onset of symptoms).

COVID-19 Diagnostics: Past, Present, and Future

“…A classic approach to increase the sensitivity of Raman-based detection is to use surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS). 76 In combination with an AI-based data analysis technique, this method allowed reliable detection of the SARS-CoV-2 virus particle in saliva samples of COVID-19-positive patients ( Figure 8 ). 68 The screening requires only a few minutes and demonstrated detection of SARS-CoV-2 with a sensitivity of over 90%.…”

Dengue Detection: Advances in Diagnostic Tools from Conventional Technology to Point of Care

“…This would allow clinicians to diagnose DENV in the early stages of the disease and improve the prognosis. The testing for clinical samples using a SERS platform based on Ag nanorod array was carried out in a study [172]. The team of investigators was successfully able to differentiate infected and non-infected patients based on the recorded SERS spectra.…”

Applications of Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering in Biochemical and Medical Analysis

“…On the other hand, SERS is one of the most sensitive techniques for detecting compounds, such as neurotransmitters at the attomolar level, and has significant advantages over routine methods (Lee et al, 2021b). The label-free detection of the dengue virus in blood samples is also an impressive example of a fast SERS-based procedure that requires only a very small sample (5 µl) (Gahlaut et al, 2020). The SERS spectra were recorded from samples placed on nanostructured silver substrates; the samples from patients with dengue positive contained denguespecific immunoglobulin (IgM) antibodies.…”