Demonstration of a Superior Deep-UV Surface-Enhanced Resonance Raman Scattering (SERRS) Substrate and Single-Base Mutation Detection in Oligonucleotides

In life science, rapid mutation detection in oligonucleotides is in a great demand for genomic and medical screening. To satisfy this demand, surface-enhanced resonance Raman spectroscopy (SERRS) in the deep-UV (DUV) regime offers a promising solution due to its merits of label-free nature, strong electromagnetic confinement, and charge transfer effect. Here, we demonstrate an epitaxial aluminum (Al) DUV-SERRS substrate that resonates effectively with the incident Raman laser and the ss-DNA at 266 nm, yielding significant SERRS signals of the detected analytes. For the first time, to the best of our knowledge, we obtaine SERRS spectra for all bases of oligonucleotides, not only revealing maximum characteristic Raman peaks but also recording the highest enhancement factor of up to 106 for a 1 nm thick adenine monomer. Moreover, our epitaxial Al DUV-SERRS substrate is able to enhance the Raman signal of all four bases of 12-mer ss-DNA and to further linearly quantify the single-base mutation in the 12-mer ss-DNA.