bioenabled sers substrates for food safety and drinking water monitoring
we present low-cost bioenabled surface-enhanced raman scattering (sers) substrates that can be massively produced in sustainable and eco-friendly methods with significant commercial potentials for the detection of food contamination and drinking water pollution. the sensors are based on diatom frustules with integrated plasmonic nanoparticles. the ultra-high sensitivity of the sers substrates comes from the coupling between the diatom frustules and ag nanoparticles to achieve dramatically increased local optical field to enhance the light-matter interactions for sers sensing. we successfully applied the bioenabled sers substrates to detect melamine in milk and aromatic compounds in water with sensitivity down to 1μg/l.
food and drinking water safety is now an omnipresent problem and is becoming a critical concern of the united states as well as in many developing countries such as china and india. centers for disease control (cdc) of the u.s. estimates that each year roughly 1 in 6 americans (or 48 million people) get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases. in china, numerous scandals such as gutter oil, baby formula, and mcdonald’s meat have raised food safety as the top social issue in recent years. the concern of drinking water is majorly caused by emerging contaminants as pointed out by the environmental protection agency (epa). for example, synthetic organic compounds are used heavily in our daily life in vast quantities for the production and preservation of food, in industrial manufacturing, as well as for healthcare of human and animals. most of these organic compounds ultimately enter urban wastewater system. although dilution and degradation during wastewater and sludge treatment removes significant amounts of the organic contaminants, many of them can still go into sewages sludge and cause groundwater and soil pollution [1].
