Abstract
A silver island film (SIF) substrate was used to demonstrate that Metal-Enhanced Fluorescence (MEF) is a powerful tool to enable detection of emission from (bio)molecules at very low concentrations. The experiments were carried out with the Fenna−Matthews−Olson (FMO) pigment-protein complex from the photosynthetic green sulfur bacterium Chlorobaculum tepidum. FMO was diluted to a level, at which no emission was detectable on a glass substrate. In contrast, the fluorescence of FMO was readily observed on the SIF substrate, even though the emission wavelength of FMO is displaced by over 300 nm from the maximum of the plasmon resonance of the SIF layer. Estimated enhancements of the fluorescence intensity of FMO on SIF are about 40-fold. The enhancement factor correlates with the improvement of the signal-to-noise ratio for FMO emission on SIF substrates.
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Acknowledgments
Research in Poland was supported by DEC-2013/11/B/ST3/03984 and DEC-2013/10/E/ST3/00034 projects from the National Science Center of Poland, 2059-F project funded by Faculty of Physics, Astronomy and Informatics, NCU, and the EUROCORES project “BOLDCATS” funded by the European Science Foundation. Part of the sample characterization was carried out at the facilities of the National Laboratory FAMO at the Institute of Physics, NCU, in Torun. R. J. Cogdell and H. Lokstein gratefully acknowledge financial support by the BBSRC/EuroCore and the BMBF (Biotechnologie 2020+, H. Lokstein). K.U. Ashraf is grateful to the University of Glasgow for financial support.
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Szalkowski, M., Ashraf, K.U., Lokstein, H. et al. Silver island film substrates for ultrasensitive fluorescence detection of (bio)molecules. Photosynth Res 127, 103–108 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11120-015-0178-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11120-015-0178-x