Bacterial DNA Recognition by SERS Active Plasma-Coupled Nanogold
Vasyl Shvalya, Aswathy Vasudevan, Martina Modic, Mohammad Abutoama, Cene Skubic, Nejc Nadižar, Janez Zavašnik, Damjan Vengust, Aleksander Zidanšek, Ibrahim Abdulhalim, Damjana Rozman, Uroš Cvelbar
Abstract
) in truncated coupled plasmonic particulates allowed SERS-probing at nanogram sample quantities. Simulations confirmed the occurrence of the strongest electric field confinement within nanometric gaps between gold dimers/chains from where the molecular fingerprints of bacterial DNA fragments gained photon scattering enhancement. The most prominent Raman modes linked to fundamental base-pair molecular vibrations were deconvoluted and used to proceed with nitrogenous base content estimation. The genomic composition (percentage of guanine-cytosine and adenine-thymine) was successfully validated by third-generation sequencing using nanopore technology, further proving that the SERS technique can be employed to swiftly specify bioentities by the discriminative principal-component statistical approach.