Magnetoplasmonic gold nanorods for the sensitive and label-free detection of glutathione.

This work exploits the magneto-optical activity of gold nanorods for the detection of sub-micromolar concentrations of glutathione using magnetic circular dichroism spectroscopy. Modulations of the magnetoplasmonic response of nanorods serve as the basis of the sensing methodology, whereby the presence of glutathione induces the end-to-end assembly of nanorods. In particular, the nanorod self-assembly enables a localized electric field in the nanocavities with adsorbed thiol molecules, whose field strength is amplified by the external magnetic field as confirmed by finite-element modeling, enabling their high-sensitivity detection. Our simple magnetoplasmonic sensor for glutathione requires no specific chemical tags and exhibits an impressive limit of detection of 97 nM.