Abstract

The use of plasmonic enhancement has provided highly sensitive molecular discrimination in samples of sizes down to even several nanometers. A variety of clever plasmonic techniques have been developed, but many of these are not relevant for biological samples. In particular, intracellular plasmonic measurements remain challenging. This is due to the fact that the most simple plasmonic device that might enter a cell is a nanoparticle or nanoparticle aggregate. After entering the cell, these are usually not under the control of the observer, and end up in accumulated spaces in the cell. There they are still useful as enhanced probes of cellular transport pathways [1], but without some method of controlling the type and location of nanoparticles, the type of experiments that can employ intracellular plasmonics is limited.

© 2015 Japan Society of Applied Physics, Optical Society of America