This review summarizes the use of a surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS)-based platform for a number of biomedical analytic applications ranging from infectious disease diagnostics to forensic science. There is an urgent need to develop rapid, sensitive, simple, and reliable method for the identification of pathogens and to meet recognized unmet technological needs in the forensic community. The use of a SERS methodology for the rapid detection and identification of bacterial clinical isolates in urine at minimal clinical levels demonstrates how this optical approach can provide rapid (< 1 h), growth-free strain-specific diagnosis of urinary tract infections (UTI), potentially with antibiotic specificity. SERS is also shown to provide growth-free signatures for distinguishing the two most common STD bacterial infections: chlamydia and gonorrhea. Efforts to substantial reduce the time for the diagnosis of the causative bacterial agents of human blood infections by a SERS-based procedure are also described. The molecular and biochemical basis for these SERS bacterial signals is fully described and this understanding provides the basis for the use of SERS, more generally, as a real-time probe of the exogenous metabolome of cells. Finally, a summary of our efforts to develop a SERS-based approach for the detection and identification of trace amounts of human body fluids for forensic investigations, a new capability for the field of forensic science, is described.
(Publisher abstract provided.)