Surface-enhanced raman scattering nanostructures potential for biomedical applications

Abstract

Owing to the definitely excellent property of nanostructures such as controllable release of ions from the buried nanoscale thin layers, cell response to microscale morphological changes of substrates, distinctively enhancing sensitivity rendered by electrodes with sizes less than 10 micrometers, and dramatically increasing electromagnetic field from local surface plasmon resonance of nanostructures, nanostructures are playing more and more crucial role in the challenging fields. As one of the most sensitive spectroscopic tools, surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) shows highly sensitive biological and chemical detection, such as applications for a better biomedical applications and ecotoxicology. It is well known that surfaces with functioned nanostructures often possessthe formation of surface plasma resonance resulted in SERS distinctive enhancement attractively. Therefore, nanostructures(such as nanorods and nanobranches/wires, nanofractal, nanoprisms, and hybrid nanostructures) for SERS are marked aim to provide the related vital information. It should be pointed out that there are a lot of substantial improvements related to the technical innovation in SERS fabrication with anisotropic nanostructures. However, obstacles or challenges are still to prevent these techniques from extensively applying in the practical applications, especially for the SERS-based systems. The significantly crucial case is that it is hard to control anisotropic nanoobjects assembly into ordered structures because the degree of order among the individual building blocks, spatial arrangement and the assembly direction determine the new and/or improved properties.