Surface-enhanced Raman Spectroscopy Study Of Azurin And Its Copper-active-site Amino Acids

Due to the important role of biological molecules in life science and fundamental research, some aspects of biological molecules will be studied in this work by means of combination of surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) and self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) technique and nanotechnology. The emphases are put on the following aspects, such as formation and structural characteristics of the monolayers of biological molecules formed on the metal surface, as well as the nature of the interaction between adsorbates and subsrates, and the changes of adsorption configuration under different conditions.In order to reveal thses changes, the research work presented here deals with the following research work: as one kind of the blue copper proteins, azurin and two of its active-site amino acids, methionine and histidine, were characterized by SERS technique. We prepared the uniform films of these biological molecules on gold or silver metal electrodes surface with different methods. Characterization of the SAMs was mainly performed by electrochemical in-situ SERS technique. The research shows that the contribution of this work is of great importance in understanding the interfacial properties of SAMs on metal surfaces. The structure and properties of the interfacial region is affected by many factors, such as solution pH, different kinds of buffers solutions, applied electrode potential and different substrates, etc. In this paper, SERS mechanism analyses were also made for the corresponding processes to understand the essence of interaction between adsorbates and substrates more detailed.