Plasmonic Photothermal Gold Bipyramid Nanoreactors for Ultrafast Real-Time Bioassays.

Nucleic acid amplification techniques have been among the most powerful tools for biological and biomedical research, and the vast majority of the bioassays rely on thermocycling that uses time-consuming and expensive Peltier-block heating. Here, we introduce a plasmonic photothermal method for quantitative real-time PCR, using gold bipyramids and light to achieve ultrafast thermocycling. Moreover, we successfully extend our photothermal system to other biological assays, such as isothermal nucleic acid amplification and restriction enzyme digestion.