Surface enhanced Raman optical activity (SEROA)

Raman optical activity (ROA) directly monitors the stereochemistry of chiral molecules and is now an incisive probe of biomolecular structure. ROA spectra contain a wealth of information on tertiary folding, secondary structure and even the orientation of individual residues in proteins and nucleic acids. Extension of ROA to an even wider range of samples could be facilitated by coupling its structural sensitivity to the low-concentration sensitivity provided by plasmon resonance enhancement. This leads to the new technique of surface enhanced ROA, or SEROA, which is complementary to both SERS and ROA. In this tutorial review, we present a survey of theoretical and experimental work undertaken to develop SEROA and discuss these efforts in the context of the ROA technique, and, based on the authors' work, outline possible future directions of research for this novel chiroptical spectroscopy. © The Royal Society of Chemistry.