Ultrabright gap-enhanced Raman tags for high-speed bioimaging

Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) is advantageous over fluorescence for bioimaging due to ultra-narrow linewidth of the fingerprint spectrum and weak photo-bleaching effect. However, the existing SERS imaging speed lags far behind practical needs, mainly limited by Raman signals of SERS nan...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature communications 2019-08, Vol.10 (1), p.3905-12, Article 3905
Main Authors: Zhang, Yuqing, Gu, Yuqing, He, Jing, Thackray, Benjamin D., Ye, Jian
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
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Animals
Bleaching
Cell Line, Tumor
Electromagnetic Fields
Female
Fluorescence
Gold - chemistry
Humanities and Social Sciences
Humans
Image resolution
Immobilization
Laboratories
Lasers
Lymph nodes
Lymphatic system
Medical imaging
Mice
Mice, Nude
Morphology
multidisciplinary
Nanoparticles
Photobleaching
Raman spectroscopy
Resolution cell
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Sentinel Lymph Node - diagnostic imaging
Spectrum Analysis, Raman - methods
Surface Properties
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Summary:Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) is advantageous over fluorescence for bioimaging due to ultra-narrow linewidth of the fingerprint spectrum and weak photo-bleaching effect. However, the existing SERS imaging speed lags far behind practical needs, mainly limited by Raman signals of SERS nanoprobes. In this work, we report ultrabright gap-enhanced Raman tags (GERTs) with strong electromagnetic hot spots from interior sub-nanometer gaps and external petal-like shell structures, larger immobilization surface area, and Raman cross section of reporter molecules. These GERTs reach a Raman enhancement factor beyond 5 × 10 9 and a detection sensitivity down to a single-nanoparticle level. We use a 370 μW laser to realize high-resolution cell imaging within 6 s and high-contrast (a signal-to-background ratio of 80) wide-area (3.2 × 2.8 cm 2 ) sentinel lymph node imaging within 52 s. These nanoprobes offer a potential solution to overcome the current bottleneck in the field of SERS-based bioimaging. The speed of surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) imaging is generally limited due to low Raman signals. Here, the authors develop bright gap-enhanced Raman tags with external hot spots and demonstrate their use in fast near-infrared bioimaging.
ISSN:2041-1723
2041-1723
DOI:10.1038/s41467-019-11829-y