Graphene coated fiber optic surface plasmon resonance biosensor for the DNA hybridization detection: Simulation analysis

Abstract

In this paper, a graphene coated optical fiber surface plasmon resonance (SPR) biosensor is presented for the detection of DNA Hybridization. For the proposed sensor, a four layer model (fiber core /metal /sensing layer /sample) where a sheet of graphene (biomolecular recognition elements ( BRE)) acting as a sensing layer is coated around the gold film because graphene enhances the sensitivity of fiber optic SPR biosensor. Numerical analysis shows the variation of resonance wavelength and spectrum of transmitted power for mismatched DNA strands and for complementary DNA strands. For mismatched DNA strands variation is negligible whereas for complementary DNA strands is considerably countable. Proposed sensor successfully distinguishes hybridization and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) by observing the variation level of resonance wavelength and spectrum of transmitted power.