A new platform for rapid and indiscriminate detection of environmental pollutants based on surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy

Abstract

In order to protect the ecological environment and human health, it is particularly important to effectively detect pollutants in environmental water. Although surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) technology is currently widely used to detect environmental pollutants, the tedious and expensive probe detection or traditional enhanced substrate detection techniques can only detect a single pollutant or a single class of pollutants, and how to directly acquire SERS signals of multiple types of pollutant molecules without labeling remains a challenge. This study established an environmental pollutant detection platform based on surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, which could amplify the Raman signal of target molecules twice to obtain SERS signals of different types of pollutants (antibiotics, pesticides, food adulterants, natural toxins, toxic anions, heavy-metal cations, bacteria and viruses) with a sensitivity reaching 0.1 pg mL⁻¹. Further, we propose that there may be a synergistic effect of chemical enhancement and electromagnetic field enhancement in the current method. For the first time, the detection platform directly obtained the SERS spectra of nitrite, Pb²⁺ and, Hg²⁺. Simultaneously, the operational stability and performance of the platform under realistic conditions were tested, the environmental contaminants were identified indiscriminately and quantified, and accurate identification of pollutants in real environment water was realized. The new high-performance detection platform developed was an ideal platform for environmental pollutant monitoring, which provides an efficient, accurate, and low-cost method for the practical application of environmental pollutant tracking in the future.