Barcoded metal nanowires

Recent advances in nanomaterials have opened up new opportunities for designing powerful barcodes for a wide range of important applications. This Highlight article reviews various strategies for creating barcoded nanowires and for decoding their distinct patterns. The arsenal of barcoded nanowires, based on diverse striping, compositional or geometrical patterns, and related readout systems, is discussed. The large number of distinct barcode patterns inherent to these nanowires holds great promise for bioanalytical tagging and authenticity testing.