Highly Monodisperse Stable Gold Nanorod Powder for Optical Sensor.

Gold nanorods (GNRs) as plasmonic metal nanoparticles are valuable for optical applications due to their tunable plasmonic properties. However, conventional colloidal GNRs face significant optical instability during storage, which limits their practical use. In this work, we developed a highly dispersible GNR powder using an octadecyl trimethylammonium bromide (CTAB)-assisted freeze-drying method, preserving the optical and chemical sensing properties of GNRs for over 4 months.

Rapid Fingerprinting of Urinary Volatile Metabolites and Point-of-Care Diagnosis of Phenylketonuria on a Patterned Nanorod Sensor Array with Multiplexed Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering Readouts.

Phenylketonuria (PKU) is one of the most common genetic metabolic diseases, especially among newborns. Traditional clinical examination of newborn blood samples for PKU is invasive, laborious, and limited to hospitals and healthcare facilities. We reported herein a SERS-based sensor array with three thiophenolic nanoreceptors built on a patterned nanorod vertical array for rapid and inexpensive detection of characteristic volatile biomarkers indicative of PKU in the urine and accurate classification of newborn baby patients all performed on a hand-held SERS spectrophotometer.