We demonstrate that a common laboratory filter paper uniformly adsorbed with biofunctionalized plasmonic nanostructures can serve as a highly sensitive transduction platform for rapid detection of trace bioanalytes in physiological fluids. In particular, we demonstrate that bioplasmonic paper enables rapid urinalysis for the detection of kidney cancer biomarkers in artificial urine down to a concentration of 10 ng/ml. Compared to conventional rigid substrates, bioplasmonic paper offers numerous advantages such as high specific surface area (resulting in large dynamic range), excellent wicking properties (naturally microfluidic), mechanical flexibility, compatibility with conventional printing approaches (enabling multiplexed detection and multi-marker biochips), and significant cost reduction.

Nonspherical metal nanoparticles are very attractive plasmonic nanostructures owing to the facile tunability of the plasmonic properties and the presence of sharp corners and edges, which act as electromagnetic hot spots for surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). However, such anisotropic nanostructures exhibit strong polarization dependence in their plasmonic properties, exhibiting significantly higher SERS intensity in certain orientations. In this paper, we demonstrate a facile strategy to achieve directed assembly of aligned gold nanorods using highly aligned electrospun nanofibers. We believe that the interstices between the nanofibers act as micro-and nanochannels, resulting in hydrodynamic drag forces on the gold nanorods, thus inducing massive alignment of the same on the nanofibers. Apart from exhibiting nearly 50 times higher SERS intensity compared to a planar SERS substrate with randomly oriented nanorods, our results highlight the importance of the orientation of anisotropic nanostructures. Finite difference time domain (FDTD) simulations employed to understand the electromagnetic field distribution around an aligned nanorod array showed excellent agreement with the experimental observations.

The ability to stop the self-assembly of gold nanocrystals at a desired stage of the process provides new leverage to understand and control the dynamics of self-assembly. Herein, competitive ligands are used to unfavor the interaction of the cross-linker with the gold surface and terminate the growth reaction of gold nanoparticles and nanorod chains.

No abstract

This study sheds light on the mechanism and dynamics of self-assembly of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) using molecular linkers such as aminothiols. An experimental model is established that enables a fine control and prediction of both assembly rate and degree. Furthermore, we have found that under certain conditions, the increase in the molar ratio of linker/AuNPs beyond a certain threshold unexpectedly and dramatically slows down the assembly rate by charge reversal of the surface of nanoparticles. As a result, the assembly rate can be easily tuned to reach a maximum growth within seconds to several days. The decrease of the same molar ratio (linker/AuNPs) below a certain value leads to self-termination of the reaction at different phases of the assembly process, thus providing nanoparticles chains of different length. This work introduces new handles for a rational design of novel self-assembled architectures in a very time-effective manner and contributes to the understanding of the effect of the assembly morphology on the optical properties of gold nanoparticles.