Label-Free Protein Analysis by Pyro-Electrohydrodynamic Jet Printing of Gold Nanoparticles

Veronica Vespini; Simonetta Grilli; Pietro Ferraro; Romina Rega; Heidi Ottevaere; Yunfeng Nie; Pellegrino Musto; Marianna Pannico

doi:10.3389/fbioe.2022.817736

Label-Free Protein Analysis by Pyro-Electrohydrodynamic Jet Printing of Gold Nanoparticles

Front Bioeng Biotechnol. 2022 Feb 22:10:817736. doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2022.817736. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Veronica Vespini¹, Simonetta Grilli¹, Pietro Ferraro¹, Romina Rega¹, Heidi Ottevaere², Yunfeng Nie², Pellegrino Musto³, Marianna Pannico³

Affiliations

¹ National Research Council of Italy (CNR-ISASI), Institute of Applied Sciences and Intelligent Systems, Pozzuoli, Italy.
² Vrije University of Brussels Pleinlaan, Brussels, Belgium.
³ Composites and Biomaterials, National Research Council of Italy (CNR-IPCB), Institute for Polymers, Pozzuoli, Italy.

Abstract

The pyro-electrohydrodynamic jet (p-jet) printing technology has been used for the fabrication of confined assemblies of gold nanoparticles with a round shape and a diameter ranging between 100 and 200 μm. The surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) performance of the p-jet substrate was evaluated by using Rhodamine 6G (R6G) as a reference. The results demonstrate that this kind of SERS substrate exhibits strong plasmonic effects and a significant reproducibility of the signal with a coefficient of variation below 15%. We tested the signal behavior also in case of the bovine serum albumin (BSA) as a model analyte, to demonstrate the affinity with biomolecules. Strong SERS activity was measured also for BSA across the whole spot area. The spectral patterns collected in different locations of the sensing area were highly reproducible. This observation was substantiated by multivariate analysis of the imaging datasets and opens the route towards a potential application of this kind of SERS substrate in biosensing.

Keywords: SERS spectroscopy; colloids; jet printing; plasmonic; sensors.