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Highly uniform and reproducible surface-enhanced Raman scattering from DNA-tailorable nanoparticles with 1-nm interior gap

Nature Nanotechnology volume 6, pages 452–460 (2011)Cite this article

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Abstract

An ideal surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) nanostructure for sensing and imaging applications should induce a high signal enhancement, generate a reproducible and uniform response, and should be easy to synthesize. Many SERS-active nanostructures have been investigated, but they suffer from poor reproducibility of the SERS-active sites, and the wide distribution of their enhancement factor values results in an unquantifiable SERS signal. Here, we show that DNA on gold nanoparticles facilitates the formation of well-defined gold nanobridged nanogap particles (Au-NNP) that generate a highly stable and reproducible SERS signal. The uniform and hollow gap (∼1 nm) between the gold core and gold shell can be precisely loaded with a quantifiable amount of Raman dyes. SERS signals generated by Au-NNPs showed a linear dependence on probe concentration (R2 > 0.98) and were sensitive down to 10 fM concentrations. Single-particle nano-Raman mapping analysis revealed that >90% of Au-NNPs had enhancement factors greater than 1.0 × 108, which is sufficient for single-molecule detection, and the values were narrowly distributed between 1.0 × 108 and 5.0 × 109.

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Figure 1: Surface DNA-mediated synthesis and characterization of DNA-anchored nanobridged nanogap particles.
Figure 2: Three-dimensional finite-element calculation of Au-NNP and silica-insulated concentric structure.
Figure 3: Excitation wavelength and dye position dependence of SERS of Au-NNPs in solution.
Figure 4: Comparison of Raman signal intensity as a function of the number of Raman dye molecules in the nanogap of the Au-NNPs and gold shell thickness.
Figure 5: Solution-based Raman intensity plots for two different Au-NNP structures as a function of probe concentration.
Figure 6: Large-scale AFM-correlated single-particle nano-Raman mapping analysis on the Au-NNPs and SERS enhancement factor distributions.

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Acknowledgements

Y.D.S. was supported by KRICT (KK-0904-02, SI-1110), the Nano R&D Program (No. 2009-0082861), the Pioneer Research Center Program of NRF (No. 2009-0081511), the Development of Advanced Scientific Analysis Instrumentation Project of KRISS by MEST and the Eco-technopia 21 Project by KME. J-M.N. was supported by the 21C Frontier Functional Proteomics Project (FPR08-A2-150) and the Nano R&D program (2008-02890) through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) from the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology. The authors would also like to acknowledge financial support from the Industrial Core Technology Development Program of the Ministry of Knowledge Economy (nos 10033183 and 10037397) and the KRICT OASIS Project from the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology. D-K.L. acknowledges financial support from the CJ Pharmaceutical Research Institute. K-S.J. acknowledges support by the Public Welfare & Safety Research Program through NRF funded by MEST (2010-0020-795).

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Author notes

  1. Dong-Kwon Lim and Ki-Seok Jeon: These authors contributed equally to this work

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry, Seoul National University, Seoul, 151-747, South Korea

    Dong-Kwon Lim, Jae-Ho Hwang & Jwa-Min Nam

  2. Laboratory for Advanced Molecular Probing (LAMP), NanoBio Fusion Research Center, Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, DaeJeon, 305-600, South Korea

    Ki-Seok Jeon & Yung Doug Suh

  3. School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,

    Hyoki Kim & Sunghoon Kwon

  4. Inter-University Semiconductor Research Center (ISRC), Seoul National University, Seoul, 151-744, South Korea

    Sunghoon Kwon

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Contributions

J-M.N., D-K.L. and Y.D.S. conceived the initial idea. J-M.N. designed synthetic schemes for the Au-NNPs, and D-K.L. and J-M.N. synthesized and characterized Au-NNPs with partial contributions from J-H.H. K-S.J. and D-K.L. obtained Raman spectra and AFM images under the guidance of Y.D.S. and J-M.N. Y.D.S. designed single-particle nano-Raman mapping experiments, and K-S.J. and D-K.L. carried out the single-particle measurements. K-S.J. calculated the EFs. H.K. and S.K. carried out three-dimensional finite-element method calculations. J-M.N., D-K.L. and Y.D.S. wrote the article with partial contributions from K-S.J., J-H.H., H.K. and S.K.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Yung Doug Suh or Jwa-Min Nam.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Lim, DK., Jeon, KS., Hwang, JH. et al. Highly uniform and reproducible surface-enhanced Raman scattering from DNA-tailorable nanoparticles with 1-nm interior gap. Nature Nanotech 6, 452–460 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2011.79

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