Since epinephrine (EP) works as an important neurotransmitter and plays significant physiological role in the central nervous system, it is of great importance to develop a ultrasensitive and accurate method to detect EP levels in biological fluids, which could improve patients’ living quality and save the treatment cost.

To address the need, a study team led by Prof. YANG Liangbao at Institute of Intelligent Machines(IIM), Hefei Institutes of Physical Science developed a 2D surface-enhanced resonance raman scattering (SERRS) platform to realize selective detection of epinephrine in serum. The work was detailed in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

In this work, the team developed a 2D SERRS platform based on the large-scale self-assembly of AuNPs arrays at the cyclohexane/water interface.

The self-assemble nanoparticles arrays functionalized with SERRS sensor (Fe-NTA) demonstrate rapid, sensitive, and selective detection of EP in the serum within 3 minutes.

Moreover, compared with the method in previous reports of magnetically assisted SERRS detection of dopamine, this method is simpler without any additional assisted materials.

Most importantly, the ordered hotspots generating in a uniform array over a larger substrate is helpful to obtain high repeatability of SERS signals.

This work provides new way to develop novel SERRS platform to realize repeatable, sensitive, and selective detection of targets in various complex fields, such as contaminated water, urine and tissue fluid.

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China, Special Financial Grant from the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation.

Schematic representation of the detection process of the 2D SERRS platform. Schematic illustrations and optical images of the (a) sample, (b) capture, (c) interfacial self-assemble, and (d) transfer the SERRS platform to a silicon wafer. (Imaged by ZHOU Binbin)