Electrochemical Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy as a Platform for Bacterial Detection and Identification

The field of bacterial screening is in need of a rapid, easy to use, sensitive, and selective platform for bacterial detection and identification. Current methods of bacterial identification lack time efficiency, resulting in problems for many sectors of society. Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) has been investigated as a possible candidate for bacterial screening due to its demonstrated ability to detect biological molecules with a high degree of sensitivity. However, the field of bacterial screening using SERS is currently facing limitations such as signal irreproducibility, weak spectra, and difficulty differentiating between strains based on the SERS spectra of bacteria alone. The current study reports on the first ever use of electrochemical surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (EC-SERS) for bacterial screening. The results of this study demonstrate the ability of EC-SERS to greatly improve upon the SERS performance for the detection of Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria both in terms of improved peak intensities and spectral richness. EC-SERS shows great promise in its ability to advance SERS-based bacterial screening and could potentially be used for more efficient species discrimination at the point-of-need (PON).