Plasmonic Nanoparticle-Decorated Micropillars as Advanced Substrates for Multimodal SERS- and MS-Based Ultrasensitive Toxicology Drug Assay

Description:
Over the last two decades, the United States has faced an ongoing drug overdose epidemic. The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed that limit to the brink. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), drug overdose related deaths have increased steadily from the COVID-19 pandemic with 93,000 deaths in 2020. The federal, state, and local forensic toxicology laboratories are overwhelmed with sample processing because there is already a serious backlog of several months to a year. Current lab-based toxicological sample analyses via GC/MS and LC/MS techniques are the gold standard but these techniques require time-consuming sample preparation and extraction that create major bottlenecks. Herein we present the fabrication of an entirely new noble metal nanoparticle-decorated PDMS micropillar patch, which is both a surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) substrate and a platform for mass spectrometry (MS) sample preparation and ionization. A simple but highly efficient micropillar patch fabrication strategy allows us to conduct a large number of real toxicology sample analyses quickly and reliably through the device’s high-throughput measurement capability. Moreover, the orientation of noble metal nanoparticles onto the PDMS micropillar patch strongly influences the SERS sensitivity and MS spraying steps. Together, This multimodal (performing both SERS and MS technique using the same patch) approach provides accurate, highly specific analytical data that will help in the battle against the drug overdose epidemic in the United States.

Speaker: Rajesh Sardar - Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology