Metal-Modified Montmorillonite as Plasmonic Microstructure for Direct Protein Detection

Thanks to its negative surface charge and high swelling behavior, montmorillonite (MMT) has been widely used to design hybrid materials for applications in metal ion adsorption, drug delivery, or antibacterial substrates. The changes in photophysical and photochemical properties observed when fluorophores interact with MMT make these hybrid materials attractive for designing novel optical sensors. Sensor technology is making huge strides forward, achieving high sensitivity and selectivity, but the fabrication of the sensing platform is often time-consuming and requires expensive chemicals and facilities. Here, we synthesized metal-modified MMT particles suitable for the bio-sensing of self-fluorescent biomolecules. The fluorescent enhancement achieved by combining clay minerals and plasmonic effect was exploited to improve the sensitivity of the fluorescence-based detection mechanism. As proof of concept, we showed that the signal of fluorescein isothiocyanate can be harvested by a factor of 60 using silver-modified MMT, while bovine serum albumin was successfully detected at 1.9 µg/mL. Furthermore, we demonstrated the versatility of the proposed hybrid materials by exploiting their plasmonic properties to develop liquid label-free detection systems. Our results on the signal enhancement achieved using metal-modified MMT will allow the development of highly sensitive, easily fabricated, and cost-efficient fluorescent- and plasmonic-based detection methods for biomolecules.