Plasmonic nanostructure-based bioimaging and detection techniques at the single-cell level

Abstract Studies on the properties of plasmonic materials and new chemical biological sensors are very important to our understanding of biological systems in single cells. Since the advent of nanofabrication techniques, plasmonic nanostructures have been widely used in various research fields including material science, biology, and medicine. The optical, electronic and catalytic properties of plasmonic nanostructures can be tuned very broadly by controlling their size, shape, and composition. Traditional optical biosensors based on the plasmonic properties of nanostructures have led to the development of high sensitivity, temporal-spatially resolved, and high-throughput plasmonic optical imaging techniques through assembly optimization of light sources, detectors, and other optical components. These techniques have been applied to single-cell research. Here, we briefly provide various applications of plasmonic nanostructures used for single-cell analysis and summarize the advanced detection and imaging techniques at the single-cell level.