Plasmon-Enhanced Fluorescence Detection of Blood Metabolites in Biosensors

摘要

Quick and precise detection of blood metabolites is a key parameter in monitoring and treating critically sick patients. Each analysis requires a certain amount of blood from the patient, and especially for babies in neonatal care repeated sampling can be life threatening. Therefore it is crucial to minimize the required amount of blood for analysis, which demands highly sensitive detectors. Optical detectors based on fluorescence possess high intrinsic sensitivity which by plasmonic signal enhancement can be increased even further. Surface-enhanced fluorescence is a new technique utilizing the effect that certain metals can have - on fluorophores. An excited state fluorophore in proximity of a such metal surface can interact with free electrons in the metal surface. A metal-induced emission pathway is introduced for the decay from the excited state to the ground state, which leads to increases in the quantum yield as well as decreases in excited state lifetimes. This means that the fluorescence signal can be significantly increased.