Nanostructured materials as biomolecular sensors for cell transport

Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) is capable of analyte detection. Advancement of SERS as an analytical tool is dependent on the fabrication of substrates with stable and reproducibly high activities. Efforts in our laboratory are addressing these issues by developing new methods for creating well-defined nanostructured substrates from gold particles in the mid-nanometer size regime. These nanoparticle ensembles demonstrate size-tunable optical properties including stable and reproducible SERS. Very recently we have determined that the nanostructured materials are compatible with living cells, and are thus excellent candidates as online sensors of cell membrane transport activity.