Bio-Mediated Synthesis of Metal Nanomaterials for SERS Application

The discovery of nanomaterials (NMs) caused a great revolution in the field of science especially in material science. The highly exotic and tunable size and shape of NMs have devoted more interest due to their unique physiochemical properties. There are various methods and methodologies involved to prepare NMs in a desired morphology. Among these, the fabrication of bio-molecules mediated NMs are highly attractive because their size and shape can be easily tuned by simple, eco-friendly and reliable way. Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is considered to be one of the most promising and well-studied bio-molecule in the fabrication of various types of NMs. The rich functionalities with the double-helix structure of DNA facilitate to accommodate a higher number of metal ions on its surface and results in perfect chain-like nano-assemblies. Moreover, the DNA mediated NMs can be highly useful for the Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) studies with appropriate analytes. The SERS technique provides the fingerprint information of the analyte molecules even at very low concentration (such as even in ppm levels). The SERS intensity is greatly influenced by the size and shape of the NMs prepared using DNA scaffolds due to their assembly in a close proximity and generation of higher number of ‘hot spots’. In this present book chapter, we elaborated the numerous methodologies involved for the synthesis of DNA-based NMs considering their size, shapes, and also highlighted the possible mechanism involved for their growth with DNA scaffolds. In-addition, the possible application of DNA mediated NMs towards SERS studies has also been detailed in this book chapter.