Dynamic monitoring and quantitative characterization of intracellular HO content by using SERS based boric acid nanoprobe.

Quantitative characterization of intracellular HO content, which is still difficult by the conventional biochemical methods due to the lack of real-time and non-invasive technique of single cell measurement, is a useful solution for cell state assessment. Based on the surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), we construct a novel boric acid (BA) nanoprobe to perform quantitative characterization of HO content, in which the p-thiol benzene boric acid (4-MPBA) reporter molecule modified with gold nanorods (AuNRs) is employed for Raman signal enhancement. The achieved result demonstrates obvious advantages of the synthesized AuNRs/4-MPBA/BA nanoprobe in measurement sensitivity of HO content. Importantly, this AuNRs/4-MPBA/BA nanoprobe will provide a powerful tool for dynamic monitoring and quantitative characterization of intracellular HO content during cell apoptosis or other cell growth processes, and then achieve important reference data for studying the corresponding molecular mechanism.