Plasmonic nanoparticles on metal-organic framework: A versatile SERS platform for adsorptive detection of new coccine and orange II dyes in food

Synthetic dyes have been widely applied to food processing, but abuse of colourants in food may pose risks to human health. To analyze new coccine (NC) and orange II (OII) in food, a versatile surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) platform was proposed. A metal-organic framework (MOF, UiO-66(NH2)) with octahedral crystal structure was synthesized and gold nanoparticles were grown on the MOF surface to fabricate UiO-66(NH2)@Au versatile SERS platform. The UiO-66(NH2)@Au displayed much better SERS performance than gold nanoparticles with high R2 of 0.9684 for NC and 0.9912 for OII and low LOD of 0.4015 mg/L for NC and 0.0546 mg/L for OII. The recoveries of NC and OII in Mirinda soft drink and paprika ranged from 82.92 to 109.63%. This study provided a sensitive and rapid method for determination of NC and OII through UiO-66(NH2)@Au, and the proposed SERS platform revealed great potential for analyzing synthetic colourants in food samples.