3 research outputs found
Aligned silver nanowires for plasmonically-enhanced fluorescence detection of photoactive proteins in wet and dry environment
We developed a method of aligning silver nanowires in a microchannel and fixing them to glass
substrates via appropriate functionalization. The attachment of nanowires to the substrate is
robust with no variation of their angles over minutes. Specific conjugation with photoactive
proteins is observed using wide-field fluorescence imaging in real-time for highly concentrated
protein solution, both in a microchannel and in a chip geometry. In the latter case we can detect
the presence of the proteins in the dropcasted solution down to single proteins. The results point
towards possible implementation of aligned silver nanowires as geometrically defined
plasmonic fluorescence sensing platform
Wide-Field Fluorescence Microscopy of Real-Time Bioconjugation Sensing
We apply wide-field fluorescence microscopy to measure real-time attachment of photosynthetic proteins to plasmonically active silver nanowires. The observation of this effect is enabled, on the one hand, by sensitive detection of fluorescence and, on the other hand, by plasmonic enhancement of protein fluorescence. We examined two sample configurations with substrates being a bare glass coverslip and a coverslip functionalized with a monolayer of streptavidin. The different preparation of the substrate changes the observed behavior as far as attachment of the protein is concerned as well as its subsequent photobleaching. For the latter substrate the conjugation process is measurably slower. The described method can be universally applied in studying protein-nanostructure interactions for real-time fluorescence-based sensing