Microfluidics-based plasmonic biosensing system based on patterned plasmonic nanostructure arrays

This review aims to summarize the recent advances and progress of plasmonic biosensors that are integrated with microfluidic chips for various biomedical detection applications. Particularly, different types of lab-on-a-chip integration of plasmonic biosensors including their principles and relevant typical designs are reviewed comprehensively. The plasmonic biosensors have made rapid progress in miniaturization sensors with much enhanced performances as motivated by the continuous advances in plasmon resonance techniques such as surface plasmon resonance (SPR), localized SPR (LSPR) on noble metallic nanostructures, surface-enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) and SPR-imaging (SPRi). Meanwhile, the microfluidic integration promotes multiplexing opportunities for the plasmonic biosensors in the simultaneous detection of multiple analytes. Hence, the microfluidics-based plasmonic biosensors provide a high-throughput platform for the biochemical molecular analysis with the advantages such as ultrahigh sensitivity, label free and real time, and thus continue to benefit the existing and emerging applications of biomedical studies, chemical analyses and point-of-care diagnostics.