Thank you for visiting nature. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer. In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. Fluorescence-based techniques are the cornerstone of modern biomedical optics, with applications ranging from bioimaging at various scales organelle to organism to detection and quantification of a wide variety of biological species of interest.
However, the weakness of the fluorescence signal remains a persistent challenge in meeting the ever-increasing demand to image, detect, and quantify biological species with low abundance. We demonstrate the applications of the plasmonic patch in improving the sensitivity and limit of detection by more than times of fluorescence-based immunoassays implemented in microtiter plates and in microarray format. The novel fluorescence enhancement approach presented here represents a disease, biomarker, and application agnostic ubiquitously applicable fundamental and enabling technology to immediately improve the sensitivity of existing analytical methodologies in an easy-to-handle and cost-effective manner, without changing the original procedures of the existing techniques.
Fluorescence probes and fluorometric approaches have been ubiquitously employed in biomedical research, not only as imaging tools for the visualization of the location and dynamics of cells and of various sub-cellular species and molecular interactions in cells and tissues but also as labels in fluoroimmunoassays for the detection and quantification of molecular biomarkers.
Fluorescence-based techniques have radically transformed biology and life sciences by unraveling the genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic signatures of disease development, progression, and response to therapy 1 , 2 , 3.
Overcoming this fundamental challenge without the use of specialized reagents, equipment, or significant modifications to well-established procedures is a holy grail in the field of biomedical optics.
