Raman rapid detection of environmental hormone

Diethylhexyl phthalate(DEHP) is a kind of plasticizer，which is regarded as environmental hormone due to reproductive toxicity to human body and also has the risk of breast cancer, endometrial cancer and liver cancer after long-term intake. In this work, a rapid surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) technique to detect the DEHP residue level in food products is developed by optimizing the synthesis of a hexakisphosphate (IP6) stabilized Au@Ag@IP6 nanoparticles. For further improvement of detection sensitivity, such SERS substrate is treated by using 1-dodecanethiol (DT) to enable its capability of capturing more DEHP molecules into the vicinity of SERS hot spots. Au@Ag@IP6/DT-based Raman protocol could analyze DEHP down to 10−8 M. By using a portable Raman system, the simple and reliable SERS method is used to on-site determine trace DEHP in real sample of energy drinks, which meets the requirement of national standard.