Surfaces functionalized by graphene oxide nanosheets for single cell investigations

In this research development of sensor suitable for single cell investigation is reported. To achieve this goal biocompatible graphene oxide (GO) nanosheets were applied as substrates for separated cell immobilization. GO nanosheets are particularly interesting due to their biocompatibility, scalability, and possibility to be deposited via simple surface functionalization protocols. In this context, we rise the hypothesis that GO nanosheets can be used to treat substrates for single cell studies. We investigated this hypothesis using several pristine and GO-modified highly oriented pyrolytic graphite, objective glass slides, polished silicon wafers, polydimethylsiloxane and mica substrates. A significantly larger frequency of single cell deposition events was observed on all substrates modified by GO. We exploited the GO functionalization to advance the Raman spectroscopy based analysis of the chemical composition of individual cells gathering different Raman spectra with respect to that collected from yeast cell colonies. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.