Lateral flow immunoassays (LFIAs) have been developed and used in a wide range of applications, in point-of-care disease diagnoses, environmental safety, and food control. However, in its classical version, it has low sensitivity and can only perform semiquantitative detection, based on colorimetric signals. Over the past decade, surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) tags have been developed in order to decrease the detection limit and enable the quantitative analysis of analytes. Of note, these tags needed new readout systems and signal processing algorithms, while the LFIA design remained unchanged. This review highlights SERS strategies of signal enhancement for LFIAs. The types of labels used, the possible gain in sensitivity from their use, methods of reading and processing the signal, and the prospects for use are discussed.
Keywords: immunochromatography; lateral flow immunoassay; surface-enhanced Raman scattering; tags.