A sensitive surface-enhanced Raman scattering method for chondroitin sulfate with Victoria blue 4R molecular probes in nanogold sol substrate.

ABSTRACT

Using silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) as the nanocatalyst, l-cysteine rapidly reduced HAuCl4 to make a stable gold nanoparticle sol (Ag/AuNP) that had a high surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) activity in the presence of Victoria blue 4R (VB4r) molecular probes. Under the selected conditions, chondroitin sulfate (Chs) reacted with the VB4r probes to form associated complexes that caused the SERS effect to decrease to 1618 cm-1 . The decreased SERS intensity was linear to the Chs concentration in the range 3.1-500 ng/ml, with a detection limit of 1.0 ng/ml Chs. Accordingly, we established a simple and sensitive SERS quantitative analysis method to determine Chs in real samples, with a relative standard deviation of 1.47-3.16% and a recovery rate of 97.6-104.2%.