Protein adsorption drastically reduces surface-enhanced Raman signal of dye molecules

There is an increasing interest in developing surface enhancement Raman spectroscopy methods for intracellular biomolecule and for in vitro protein detection that involve dye or protein-dye conjugates. In this work, we have demonstrated that protein adsorption on silver nanoparticle (AgNP) can significantly attenuate the surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) signal of dye molecules in both protein/dye mixtures and protein/dye conjugates. SERS spectra of 12 protein/dye mixtures were acquired using 4 proteins [bovine serum albumin (BSA), lysozyme, trypsin, and concanavalin A] and three dyes [Rhodamine 6G, adenine, and fluorescein isothiocyanate (FITC)]. Besides the protein/dyemixtures, spectra were also obtained for the free dyes and four FITC-conjugated proteins. While no SERS signal was observed in protein/FITC mixtures or conjugates, a significantly reduced SERS intensity (up to 3 orders of magnitude) was observed for both R6G and adenine in their respective protein mixtures. Quantitative estimation of the number of dye molecules absorbed onto AgNP implied that the degree of R6G SERS signal reduction in the R6G/BSA sample is 2 to 3 orders of magnitude higher than what could be accounted for by the difference in the amount of the absorbed dyes. This finding has significant implications for both intracellular SERS analyses and in vitro protein detection using SERS tagging strategies that rely on Raman dyes as reporter molecules. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.