Congratulations to Assistant Professor Ishan Barman and his postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Ming Li, on being published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition. Their article, titled “Shedding Light on the Extinction-Enhancement Duality in Gold Nanostar-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy,” will appear in the upcoming print issue and is currently available online.
“Shedding Light on the Extinction-Enhancement Duality in Gold Nanostar-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy” showcases findings in one of Professor Barman’s primary research areas: breast cancer diagnosis and therapy monitoring. This particular manuscript explores the unusual tradeoff that exists in the deployment of gold nanostars in colloidal suspension. The article is the first to report the presence of this duality in synthesized gold nanostar suspensions, which provide exceptional enhancement due to the large number of self-generated hot spots. Research observations found that the optimal localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) band is blue-shifted with respect to the laser wavelength. This is in sharp contrast to the conventional wisdom where the “optimal” LSPR band is expected to be sandwiched between the excitation and Raman scattered wavelengths.
The research and findings documented in this manuscript are conducive to designing a palette of reliable probes for high throughput and ultrasensitive multiplexing. This is an as yet little explored, but very significant finding for the optimal development of surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy tags in bioanalytical and clinical applications. Specifically, the fundamental understanding of the architecture and deployment conditions of the nanostars paves the way for the development of a diagnostic assay for circulating biomarkers that can measure metastatic disease with high sensitivity and specificity and enable assessment of temporal changes in tumor burden in response to therapy.
In addition to Drs. Barman and Li, the other co-authors of the study were Dr. J. W. Kang and Dr. R. R. Dasari from the Laser Biomedical Research Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. To view the article in its entirety, please visit http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1002/anie.201409314/.
For more information on Assistant Professor Ishan Barman and his research, click here.