Intracellular delivery of top-down fabricated tunable nano-plasmonic resonators

Abstract

Engineered plasmonic structures fabricated using top-down technologies have demonstrated huge enhancements in the optical response of molecules, including Raman scattering. However, providing a sufficient number of such top-down fabricated nanostructures in solution has been a nontrivial task which has limited their potential in intracellular applications. Here we report the development of a protocol for the intracellular delivery of tunable nanoplasmonic resonators fabricated via scalable top-down techniques. This offers excellent possibilities towards the real-time parallel optical detection of intracellular molecular events. © 2013 The Royal Society of Chemistry.