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The study of optical affinity biosensors based on plasmonic nanostructures has received significant attention in recent years. The sensing surfaces of these biosensors have complex architectures, often composed of localized regions of high sensitivity (electromagnetic hot spots) dispersed along a dielectric substrate having little to no sensitivity. Under conditions such that the sensitive regions are selectively functionalized and the remaining regions passivated, the rate of analyte capture (and thus the sensing performance) will have a strong dependence on the nanoplasmonic architecture. Outside of a few recent studies, there has been little discussion on how changes to a nanoplasmonic architecture will affect the rate of analyte transport. We recently proposed an analytical model to predict transport to such complex architectures; however, those results were based on numerical simulation and to date, have only been partially verified. In this study we measure the characteristics of analyte transport across a wide range of plasmonic structures, varying both in the composition of their base plasmonic element (microwires, nanodisks, and nanorods) and the packing density of such elements. We functionalized each structure with nucleic acid-based bioreceptors, where for each structure we used analyte/receptor sequences as to maintain a Damköhler number close to unity. This method allows to extract both kinetic (in the form of association and dissociation constants) and analyte transport parameters (in the form of a mass transfer coefficient) from sensorgrams taken from each substrate. We show that, despite having large differences in optical characteristics, measured rates of analyte transport for all plasmonic structures match very well to predictions using our previously proposed model. These results highlight that, along with optical characteristics, analyte transport plays a large role in the overall sensing performance of a nanoplasmonic biosensor.

Surface plasmon resonance microscopy and imaging are optical methods that enable observation and quantification of interactions of nano- and microscale objects near a metal surface in a temporally and spatially resolved manner. This review describes the principles of surface plasmon resonance microscopy and imaging and discusses recent advances in these methods, in particular, in optical platforms and functional coatings. In addition, the biological applications of these methods are reviewed. These include the detection of a broad variety of analytes (nucleic acids, proteins, bacteria), the investigation of biological systems (bacteria and cells), and biomolecular interactions (drug-receptor, protein-protein, protein-DNA, protein-cell).

We present a new optical biosensor based on surface plasmons excited on an array of gold nanostripes via attenuated total reflection. We investigate performance of the biosensor using a theoretical model that considers both optical and mass transport aspects. The analysis of optical aspects employs two different approaches: a complex model incorporating optical characteristics of the nanostructure as well as the noise characteristics of the optical readout system and a simple model based solely on the figure of merit of the nanostructure. The theoretical analysis suggests that the optimized biosensor is able to detect molecular analytes at concentrations lower by a factor of ~ 10 than conventional surface plasmon resonance biosensors. In order to validate the theoretical model, we characterize the gold nanostripe arrays of different designs in model refractometric and biosensing experiments. We show that the nanoplasmonic sensor exhibits refractive index sensitivity of 1989 nm/RIU and refractive index resolution down to 3.6 × 10 − 7 RIU. In addition, we use the nanoplasmonic biosensor for the detection of a microRNA biomarker of myelodysplastic syndromes (miRNA-125b) and demonstrate that the biosensor can detect miRNA-125b at concentrations down to ~ 17 pM. • Novel nanoplasmonic biosensor based on an array of gold nanostripes reported. • Model of biosensor performance including optical and mass transport effects provided. • Performance improvement over conventional SPR biosensors demonstrated. • The limit of detection for miRNA-125b established at 17 pM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]