Plasmon-enhanced emission from single fluorescent proteins

Abstract

In this work, we use evaporated gold nanoparticle films (GNPFs) as substrates for plasmon-enhanced imaging of two fluorescent proteins (FPs): mCherry and YFP. Through single-molecule epifluorescence microscopy, we show enhancement of single FP emission in the presence of GNPFs. The gold-coupled FPs demonstrate emission up to four times brighter and seven times longer lived, yielding order-of-magnitude enhancements in total photons detected. Ultimately, this results in increased localization accuracies for single-molecule imaging. Furthermore, we introduce preliminary results for enhancement of mCherry-labeled TcpP membrane proteins inside live Vibrio cholerae cells coupled to GNPFs. Our work indicates that plasmonic substrates are uniquely advantageous for super-resolution imaging and that plasmon-enhanced imaging is a promising technique for improving live cell single-molecule microscopy.