One-click investigation of shape influence of silver nanostructures on SERS performance for sensitive detection of COVID-19
Graphical abstract
Introduction
Since December 2019, the novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19) as a new severe acute respiratory disease with accompanied by breathing distress, fever, cough, and other symptoms began to spread rapidly worldwide [[1], [2], [3], [4]]. Today, reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is widely used to detect clinical samples, such as nasal, pharyngeal swabs, and blood, known as the “gold standard” technique [[5], [6], [7], [8]]. At present, the main assay techniques include chest computed tomography (CT), Enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), chemiluminescent immunoassay, and Colloidal gold immunoassay, but they generally requires relatively high qualification requirements, relatively long detection time, cumbersome operation steps, and easy contamination [9]. Therefore, it is urgent to develop a rapid, practical, high accuracy and convenient detection system to deal with the soaring novel coronavirus infection in the world.
SERS with the advantage of high sensitivity has been widely used in airport explosion-proof security checks. Most Raman peaks have a narrow width suitable for multiplex analysis, and the measurements can be conveniently made under ambient and aqueous conditions, etc. [10] Recently, handheld SERS has attracted increasing interest in biological analysis [11]. Silver nanomaterials with various nanostructures are widely used for SERS biosensing chips due to their high electrical/thermal conductivities [[12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21]]. These research work indicated that the SERS property of silver nanomaterials are highly dependent on their size and morphology [22]. However, most of the work is limited to the use of single structure silver nanostructures to construct SERS biosensing chips. The research on the relationship between the morphology and SERS property of silver nanostructures is relatively scarce [23]. Therefore, by adjusting different parameters, the preparation of silver nanostructures with different morphologies and the rapid screening of optimal Raman enhancement performance can be realized [[24], [25], [26]], which is of great significance for constructing an accurate COVID-19 detection platform [[27], [28], [29], [30], [31], [32], [33]].
Here, we one-click synthesized multiple silver nanostructures by integrated electrodeposition platform for sensitive SARS-CoV-2 RNA sequence SERS detection. Such platform can achieve simultaneously detecting multiple biomarkers or repeatedly detecting on the same biomarkers for enhancing the reproducibility. In our experiments, four different silver nanostructures were one-click synthesized by adjusting different electrodeposition parameters, SERS performance results indicated that the dendritic silver nanostructures had better signal enhancement effect comparing with other three silver nanostructures. Such platform has great potential to meet the diverse clinical medicine and disease control needs of the future.
Section snippets
Materials and instruments
Silver nitrate (AgNO3)was purchased from Guangzhou Jinhua Chemical Reagent Co. Ltd. Potassium nitrate (KNO3) was purchased from Beijing Chemical Plant Co. Ltd. Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) was purchased from Dow Europe GmbH. Sulfuric acid (H2SO4, 98%, AR), acetone (>99.5%, AR), ethanol (>99.8%, GR), and Rhodamine6G were purchased from Sigma-Aldrich. The template with 4 × 4 array through-holes was custom made from Beijing Zhongjingkeyi Technology Co. Ltd, China. All other reagents were
Arrayed COVID-19 detection mini-pillar platform
Fig. 1 demonstrated the programmed nanomaterial synthesis and subsequent SARS-CoV-2 RNA sequences SERS detection. The whole processes for such platform mainly include mini-pillar-based platform fabrication, multiple nanomaterials regulation and characterization, and COVID-19 sampling and sensing. Briefly, we firstly prepared the basis of the whole platform using PDMS with 4 × 4 mini-pillars on top of the platform as shown in Fig. 1a, with three electrodes implanted in each mini-pillar (Ag as
Conclusion
In summary, we prepared multi-channel mini-pillar biosensor platform for the rapid, simple, and sensitive SERS detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA sequence. We skillfully one-click synthesized four kinds of silver nanostructures with different morphologies by electrochemical deposition, which are bulk, dendritic, spherical, and spiny. Then, we screened the four morphologies of silver nanostructures by SERS. Dendritic silver nanostructures are the most effective enhanced Raman signals. The platform can
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Zehua Li: contributed equally to this work, carried out the experiments, analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript. Yong Luo: contributed equally to this work, wrote and modified the manuscript. Yongchao Song: contributed equally to this work, carried out the experiments and analyzed the data. Qinglin Zhu: analyzed the data. Tailin Xu: supervised the project, modified the manuscript, and suppled the funding. Xueji Zhang: suppled the funding.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
We acknowledge funding from Shenzhen Stability Support Plan (20200806163622001), Joint Fund of the Ministry of Education for Equipment Pre-research (8091B0206), Shenzhen Overseas Talent Program, and Shenzhen Key Laboratory for Nano-Biosensing Technology (ZDSYS20210112161400001).
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These authors contribute to the paper equally.