Biologically Inspired Superwetting Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) Substrates

Raman analysis has great application prospects in chemical analysis, environmental monitoring, biomedical and other fields due to its powerful molecular recognition ability. With the rise of nanomaterials and biomimetic wettable materials, substrates with superwettable surface structures show excellent surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) performance, which is beneficial to reduce the detection limit of the substrate in SERS studies due to the superwettable substrate’s superb droplet fixed-point trapping and concentrating ability. This paper summarizes the research progress of bionic superwettable materials for SERS applications in recent years. Starting from the interesting wettability phenomenon on organisms such as lotus leaves and desert beetles in nature, the theory of this wettability phenomenon is explained and the wettability model is introduced. Finally, the challenges and future directions of biomimetic superwettable materials for SERS sensing are discussed.