DNA-Engineerable Ultraflat-Faceted Core–Shell Nanocuboids with Strong, Quantitative Plasmon-Enhanced Fluorescence Signals for Sensitive, Reliable MicroRNA Detection

Abstract

There has been enormous interest in understanding and utilizing plasmon-enhanced fluorescence (PEF) with metal nanostructures, but maximizing the enhancement in a reproducible, quantitative manner while reliably controlling the distance between dyes and metal particle surface for practical applications is highly challenging. Here, we designed and synthesized fluorescence-amplified nanocuboids (FANCs) with highly enhanced and controlled PEF signals, and fluorescent silica shell-coated FANCs (FS-FANCs) were then formed to fixate the dye position and increase particle stability and fluorescence signal intensity for biosensing applications. By uniformly modifying fluorescently labeled DNA on Au nanorods and forming ultraflat Ag shells on them, we were able to reliably control the distance between fluorophores and Ag surface and obtained an ∼186 fluorescence enhancement factor with these FANCs. Importantly, FS-FANCs were utilized as fluorescent nanoparticle tags for microarray-based miRNA detection, and we achieved >103-fold higher sensitivity than commercially available chemical fluorophores with 100 aM to 1 pM dynamic range.