Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) is a powerful analytical technique for substance identification and analyte determination in ultralow concentrations in complex media. Recent progress in SERS-based biosensors has paved the way to reproducible, sensitive, rapid and easy-to-use point-of-care (PoC) systems that are promising for the implementation in diagnostics. This review summarizes different approaches in biosensor construction, analytical signal generation, as well as the first attempts of their use for the real clinical samples. The review focuses on the pathogen detection in the biological liquids in trace amounts. Available clinical diagnostics failed to meet criteria for accurate PoC diagnostics, such as time of analysis -1 and specificity of detection. Several SERS-biosensors met these criteria achieving multiple pathogens in the sample. Another significant ability of the SERS-based biosensors and test systems is rapid determination of drug-resistance at low pathogen titers. Several excellent examples and future prospects are discussed in the review. This critical analysis demonstrates that the successful integration of SERS into diagnostic platforms depends on the combination of three main elements: 1) a reproducible SERS substrate with a high enhancement coefficient, 2) a recognition element that ensures specificity of detection, and 3) additional approaches for concentrating the analyte and amplifying the analytical signal. The bibliography includes 300 references.
Alieva et al. (Wed,) studied this question.