Inkjet-Printed Fluidic Paper Devices for Chemical and Biological Analytics Using Surface Enhanced Raman spectroscopy

The fabrication of substrates for surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) by printing plasmonic structures on paper has emerged as a potential low-cost replacement for conventional nanofabricated SERS devices. Not only are the paper devices low in cost to produce, the inherent flexibility and fluidic transport capabilities of paper provide advantages in sample collection and processing, as well as analyte concentration. In this study, we review the recent progress in paper or membrane SERS devices fabricated through inkjet printing and other deposition methods. We then report a new potential diagnostics application for paper SERS devices that leverages the fluidic transport and chromatographic capabilities of paper to enable SERS-based detection following PCR. The use of paper SERS creates the potential for a simple yet densely multiplexed PCR assay that is not possible with conventional fluorescence-based transduction.