Surface enhanced Raman scattering analysis with filter-based enhancement substrates: A mini review

Abstract

Surface enhanced Raman is a powerful analytical tool with high sensitivity and unique specificity and promising applications in various branches of analytical chemistry. Despite the fabrication of ingenious enhancement substrate used in laboratory research, the development of simple, flexible, and cost-effective substrate is also great important for promoting the application of SERS in practical analysis. Recently, paper and filter membrane as support to fabricate flexible SERS substrates received considerable attentions. Paper-based SERS substrate has been reviewed but no summary on filter-based SERS substrate is available. Compared with paper, filter membrane has unique advantage in robust mechanics, diverse component, and tunable pore size. These characteristics endow the filter-based substrates great advantages for practical SERS analysis including simple and low-cost substrate preparation, high efficiency in preconcentration, separation and detection procedure. Therefore, filter-based substrates have shown great promise in SERS analysis in environment monitoring, food safety with high sensitivity and efficiency. As more and more work has been emerged, it is necessary to summarize the state of such a research topic. Here, the research on filter involved SERS analysis in the past eight years is summarized. A short introduction was presented to understand the background, and then the brief history of filter-based substrate is introduced. After that, the preparation of filter-based substrate and the role of filter are summarized. Then, the application of filter involved SERS substrate in analysis is presented. Finally, the challenges and perspective on this topic is discussed.

Detecting polystyrene nanoplastics using filter paper-based surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy

“…Particular advantages attributed to filter paper-based SERS are the ability to: create greater hot-spot sites, concentrate analyte, and ability to separate non-target molecules (if required). 16 Filter paper-based SERS substrates have recently shown strong capability in detecting trace amount of small molecules 16 while a cellulose-based substrate has been reported as a ESI † for SERS active NPs. 17 To our knowledge, this study is the first account of incorporating AuNPs on filter paper substrates that demonstrates the SERS capability with polystyrene nanoplastics (PSNPs).…”

Colloidal nanomaterials for water quality improvement and monitoring

“…Polymer-based filter membranes show important features for these purposes, namely robust mechanical resistance and tuneable pore size. These membranes are available in various materials that allow sample concentration by large-volume filtration, promoting the target analyte uptake and, consequently, easier detection by SERS ( Xu et al, 2021b ). The lightweight and flexibility of membrane SERS substrates can also be combined with portable Raman spectrometers and smartphones, providing on-site detection ( Gao et al, 2016 ; Guo et al, 2019 ; Sun et al, 2021 ).…”

Nanoparticle-enhanced laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy for serum element analysis using an Ag NP-coated filter paper substrate

“…The Ag NPs paper substrate has been widely developed by the surface-enhanced Raman scattering spectroscopy (SERS) community, [23][24][25][26][27][28] and good detection sensitivity has been obtained. As for LIBS, Gondhalekar et al have reported a paperbased substrate coated with lanthanide markers, 29 which showed promising detection potential in biological analytes.…”