Theranostics 2022; 12(4):1870-1903. doi:10.7150/thno.66859 This issue Cite
Review
1. College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Xinyang Key Laboratory of Functional Nanomaterials for Bioanalysis, Xinyang Normal University, Xinyang 464000, China.
2. State Key Laboratory of Food Nutrition and Safety, College of Food Science and Engineering, Tianjin University of Science and Technology, Tianjin 300457, China.
3. Department of Colorectal Surgery, Tianjin Union Medical Center, Tianjin Institute of Coloproctology, Tianjin 300000, China.
4. State Key Laboratory of Medicinal Chemical Biology, Research Center for Analytical Sciences, and Tianjin Key Laboratory of Molecular Recognition and Biosensing, College of Chemistry, Nankai University, Tianjin 300071, China.
*H.L. and X.G. contributed equally to this work.
Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) has emerged as a valuable technique for molecular identification. Due to the characteristics of high sensitivity, excellent signal specificity, and photobleaching resistance, SERS has been widely used in the fields of environmental monitoring, food safety, and disease diagnosis. By attaching the organic molecules to the surface of plasmonic nanoparticles, the obtained SERS tags show high-performance multiplexing capability for biosensing. The past decade has witnessed the progress of SERS tags for liquid biopsy, bioimaging, and theranostics applications. This review focuses on the advances of SERS tags in biomedical fields. We first introduce the building blocks of SERS tags, followed by the summarization of recent progress in SERS tags employed for detecting biomarkers, such as DNA, miRNA, and protein in biological fluids, as well as imaging from in vitro cell, bacteria, tissue to in vivo tumors. Further, we illustrate the appealing applications of SERS tags for delineating tumor margins and cancer diagnosis. In the end, perspectives of SERS tags projecting into the possible obstacles are deliberately proposed in future clinical translation.
Keywords: SERS tag, biomarkers, tumor, bioimaging, theranostics