Applied surface enhanced Raman Spectroscopy in plant hormones detection, annexation of advanced technologies: A...

Plant hormones are the molecules that control the vigorous development of plants and help to cope with the stress conditions efficiently due to vital and mechanized physiochemical regulations. Biologists and analytical chemists, both endorsed the extreme problems to quantify plant hormones due to their low level existence in plants and the technological support is devastatingly required to established reliable and efficient detection methods of plant hormones. Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) technology is becoming vigorously favored and can be used to accurately and specifically identify biological and chemical molecules. Subsistence molecular properties with varying excitation wavelength require the pertinent substrate to detect SERS signals from plant hormones. Three typical mechanisms of Raman signal enhancement have been discovered, electromagnetic, chemical and Tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (TERS). Though, complex detection samples hinder in consistent and reproducible results of SERS-based technology. However, different algorithmic models applied on preprocessed data enhanced the prediction performances of Raman spectra by many folds and decreased the fluorescence value. By incorporating SERS measurements into the microfluidic platform, further highly repeatable SERS results can be obtained. This review paper tends to study the fundamental working principles, methods, applications of SERS systems and their execution in experiments of rapid determination of plant hormones as well as several ways of integrated SERS substrates. The challenges to develop an SERS-microfluidic framework with reproducible and accurate results for plant hormone detection are discussed comprehensively and highlighted the key areas for future investigation briefly.