Graphene-Enhanced Plasmonic Interfaces: A General Strategy for Highly Sensitive Detection of Biomolecular Interactions.

Abstract

The detection of cells and viruses is essential for research and clinical applications, creating a demand for high-performance biosensors. Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) enables label-free, real-time detection and is highly promising for healthcare, including point-of-care diagnostics. However, its performance is often limited in complex biological systems. Integrating two-dimensional (2D) materials such as graphene into SPR sensors has been proposed as a strategy to improve sensitivity, but experimental evidence remains scarce. Here, we investigate the influence of graphene on SPR biosensors using several relevant biological examples, including antibody-virus and peptide-cell interactions. Compared to gold sensors, graphene integration produced reproducible signal enhancement of up to 600%, far exceeding previous reports.  Importantly, graphene-enhanced SPR enabled discrimination between different cell types, a capability not observed with gold alone. Our findings demonstrate that graphene provides substantially greater enhancement than predicted and can be applied across diverse biological systems. This establishes graphene-enhanced SPR as a powerful platform for advancing biosensor performance, with broad potential in biomedical research, diagnostics, and gene therapy.