Controllable In-Situ Growth of Silver Nanoparticles on Filter Paper for Flexible and Highly Sensitive SERS Sensors for Malachite Green Residue Detection
Lingzi Zhang, Jun Liu, Guowei Zhou, Zhiliang Zhang
Abstract
In this work, a series of highly flexible and sensitive surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) substrates were fabricated by the in-situ growth of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) on polydopamine (PDA) templated filter papers (FPs), based on mussel-inspired surface chemistry. The obtained FP@PDA@AgNPs strips exhibited high sensitivity and reproducibility with Rhodamine 6G (R6G) probe molecules, with a calculated detection limit of approximately 10−10 M. More critically, these FP@PDA@AgNPs strips could be used as outstanding flexible SERS sensors to quickly collect and detect malachite green (MG) residues on fish scales, crab shells and shrimp skins by a swabbing extraction method. The detection limits for MG residues were calculated to be approximately as low as 0.04635 pg/cm2, 0.06952 pg/cm2 and 0.09270 pg/cm2, respectively. This facile and efficient strategy could to be utilized as a universal approach to fabricating a variety of flexible, cheap and portable SERS sensors for surface contamination analysis, and has great potential in the environmental scientific analysis and food safety monitoring fields.