Abstract

Nanoplasmonic Platforms For Biosensing Applications

Amy Shen, Provost, Professor, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology

Fabricating large-scale bioplasmonic materials at high-throughput is important for the development of bio/chemical sensors and high resolution nanomaterial based bioimaging tools. However, techniques specific to large-scale synthesis of biocompatible nanoplasmonic materials have found limited acceptance in industry due to their time-consuming and complex fabrication procedures. Here, by exploiting properties of reactive ions in a SF6 plasma environment, we assemble nanoplasmonic substrates containing mushroom-like structures with SiO₂ (insulator) stems and metal caps of gold (45-60 nm in total height, ~20 nm in width), evenly distributed with ~10 nm spacing on a glass substrate. We demonstrate that our developed gold nanomushroom (Au NM) substrate is biocompatible and sensitive for localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) based biosensing applications. This nanoplasmonic platform (coupled with microfluidics) is used for monitoring mitosis of fibroblasts for 7 days, E. coli biofilm formation, protein/DNA based immunoassays , and DNA polymerase activity in real-time.