Light Energy Conversion Surface with Gold Dendritic Nanoforests/Si Chip for Plasmonic Polymerase Chain Reaction.

Hung Ji Huang,Ming-Hua Shiao,Jyh-Jian Chen,Shu-Ling Huang,Chia-Hsien Hsu,Chih-Chieh Yeh,Yu-Cheng Chiang,Yung-Sheng Lin

doi:10.3390/s20051293

Abstract

Surfaces with gold dendritic nanoforests (Au DNFs) on Si chips demonstrate broadband-light absorption. This study is the first to utilize localized surface plasmons of Au DNFs/Si chips for polymerase chain reaction (PCR) applications. A convenient halogen lamp was used as the heating source to illuminate the Au DNFs/Si chip for PCR. A detection target of Salmonella spp. DNA fragments was reproduced in this plasmonic PCR chip system. By semi-quantitation in gel electrophoresis analysis, the plasmonic PCR with 30 cycles and a largely reduced processing time provided results comparable with those of a commercial PCR thermal cycler with 40 cycles in more than 1 h. In the presence of an Au DNFs/Si chip, the plasmonic PCR provides superior results in a short processing time.

Highlights

Light conversion/redistribution surfaces are essential for harvesting thermal [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10], optical [11], electrical [12,13,14], photocatalytical or photochemical [15,16], or other types of energy from electromagnetic waves
After 3 min of growth time in fluoride-assisted galvanic replacement reaction (FAGRR), the Au dendritic nanoforests (DNFs) homogeneously grew on the Si substrate (Figure 2a,c) and the scanning electron microscope (SEM) picture presents that the height of the DNFs increased to approximately
The synthesized Au DNFs were further studied by applying fast Fourier transformation (FFT) [36] on the SEM image/data by using ImageJ

Summary

Introduction

Light conversion/redistribution surfaces are essential for harvesting thermal [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10], optical [11], electrical [12,13,14], photocatalytical or photochemical [15,16], or other types of energy from electromagnetic waves. Using artificially created surface structures on Si, the absorption efficiency and, in turn, the processing efficiency of solar cells can be enhanced to a large extent [12]. The plasmonic light–energy conversion efficiency strongly affects the processing efficiency of applications, such as solar-light-enhanced methanol oxidation reactions [14,15], water heating [2], and photocatalytic reactions [16]. The simplified energy transformation of harvested light in metals is known as electromagnetic heating [2]. This paper discusses the use of surfaces of dendritic nanoforests (DNFs) on a Si substrate [13,14] to enhance plasmonic light-to-heat conversion for rapid polymerase chain reactions (PCRs)

Methods

Results

Conclusion