Dynamic monitoring and quantitative characterization of intracellular H₂O₂ content by using SERS based boric acid...

Quantitative characterization of intracellular H₂O₂ content, which is still difficult by the conventional biochemical methods due to the lack of real-time and non-invasive technique of single cell measurement, is a useful solution for cell state assessment. Based on the surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), we construct a novel boric acid (BA) nanoprobe to perform quantitative characterization of H₂O₂ content, in which the p-thiol benzene boric acid (4-MPBA) reporter molecule modified with gold nanorods (AuNRs) is employed for Raman signal enhancement. The achieved result demonstrates obvious advantages of the synthesized AuNRs/4-MPBA/BA nanoprobe in measurement sensitivity of H₂O₂ content. Importantly, this AuNRs/4-MPBA/BA nanoprobe will provide a powerful tool for dynamic monitoring and quantitative characterization of intracellular H₂O₂ content during cell apoptosis or other cell growth processes, and then achieve important reference data for studying the corresponding molecular mechanism.