Since the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that is the greatest threat to our society, the rapid discovery of drug resistant bacteria is urgently needed to guide antibiotic treatment development. The current work reports the design of a 2D-0D heterostructure-based surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) platform, which has the capability for the rapid identification of the multidrug resistant strain of Salmonella DT104. We report the synthesis and characterization of the heterostructure SERS platform using a two-dimensional (2D) WS2 transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) and zero dimensional (OD) plasmonic gold nanoparticles (GNPs). Results show the 2D-0D heterostructure-based SERS platform exhibit extremely high Raman enhancement capabilities. Using the Rh-6G and 4-ATP probe molecules, we determined the SERS sensitivity is in the range of ~ 10-10 to `10-11 M, several orders of magnitude higher than 2D-TMD on its own (10-3 M) and 0D-GNPs on their own (~`10-6 to 10-7 M). Experimental and theoretical finite difference time-domain (FDTD) simulation data indicate that the synergistic effect of an electromagnetic mechanism (EM) and a chemical mechanism (CM) on the heterostructure is responsible for the excellent SERS enhancement observed. Nobably, the experiemental data reported here show that the heterostructure-based SERS has the ability to separate a multidrug resistance strain from a normal strain of Salmonella by monitoring the antibiotic-pathogen interaction within 90 minutes, even at a concentration of 100 CFU mL-1.

WS2-gold nanoparticle heterostructure-based novel SERS platform for the rapid identification of antibiotic-resistant pathogens

ACS Fall 2021

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