Aradhana Dwivedi

In this study, three silver surfaces with morphologies from 0D to 3D were realized by wet‐chemical reduction of mono‐, bi‐ and triatomic silver salts on silicon surfaces. First, we found that the choice of the starting silver salt can influence the formation of silver nanostructures ranging from nanoparticles to dendrites. Second, we found that the surface‐enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) signal is highly dependent on the selected starting silver salt. Using adenine as a test analyte, our studies showed that surfaces with dendritic structures obtained using silver sulfate and phosphate exhibit much higher SERS sensitivity, and that surfaces obtained using silver sulfate have significantly higher chemical stability with respect to oxidation when stored in ambient conditions for 8 weeks compared to standard silver surfaces obtained from silver nitrate. The implementation of synchrotron‐based XPS studies, which allowed the variation of kinetic energy and surface analysis depth profiling, showed that silver nitrate formed surfaces begin significantly to oxidize after 2 weeks, and initially exhibit a heterogeneous surface structure that has a “sandwich”‐like structure, in which oxidized silver phases are present in the metallic silver matrix, compared to pure silver surfaces terminated with sulfate or phosphate groups obtained from silver sulfate or phosphate.

The blood-based samples for the original publication

Accurate detection of antibiotics in biological samples is essential for clinical diagnoses and therapeutic drug monitoring. This research examines how proteins and other substances in blood plasma affect the detection of the antibiotic ceftriaxone using surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS). We detected ceftriaxone spiked in blood plasma without sample preparation within the range of 1 mg/mL to 50 µg/mL. By employing a pretreatment approach involving methanol-based protein precipitation to eliminate interfering substances from a spiked blood plasma solution, we could detect ceftriaxone down to 20 µg/mL. The comparative analysis demonstrates that the protein precipitation step enhances the sensitivity of SERS-based detection of drugs in the matrix blood plasma. The insights derived from this study are highly beneficial and can prove advantageous in developing new antibiotic detection methods that are both sensitive and selective in complex biological matrices. These methods can have important implications for clinical treatments.