Exploring near-field sensing efficiency of complementary plasmonic metasurfaces for immunodetection of tumor markers

Plasmonic metasurface biosensors have great potential on label-free high-throughput clinical detection of human tumor markers. In the past decades, nanopillar and nanohole metasurfaces have become the common choices for plasmonic biosensing, because they typically enable universal simple large-area nanopatterns via a low-cost reproducible fabrication manner. The two kinds of metasurfaces have the complementary shapes and are used to be assumed as the same type of two-dimensional plasmonic nanograting for biosensing. Up to date, there is still a lack of comparison study on their biosensing performance, which is critical to guide their better applications on tumor marker detection. In this study, we compare the bulk/surface refractive index and sensitivity of plasmonic nanopillar (PNP) and plasmonic nanohole (PNH) metasurfaces in order to evaluate their biosensing capabilities. The sensing physics about their space near-field utilization is systematically revealed. The PNH metasurface demonstrates a higher biomolecule sensitivity versus the complementary PNP metasurface, and its limit of detection for bovine serum albumin reaches ∼0.078 ng/mL, which implies a greater potential of detecting cancer biomarkers. We further adopt the PNH metasurfaces for immunoassay of three typical tumor markers by testing clinical human serum samples. The results imply that the immunodetection of alpha-fetoprotein has the most optimal sensing efficiency with the lowest detection concentration (<5 IU/mL), which is much lower than its clinical diagnosis threshold of ∼16.5 IU/mL for medical examination. Our work has not only illuminated the distinct biosensing properties of complementary metasurfaces, but also provided a promising way to boost plasmonic biosensing for point-of-care testing.