Ag/ZnFe2O4-Au NPs-Based SERS Detection of Rosiglitazone in Seawater.

Pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs) have attracted considerable attention as emerging environmental contaminants. Among them, rosiglitazone (RSG), a widely used thiazolidinedione hypoglycemic agent in clinical therapy, has raised growing environmental and health concerns due to its continuous release into aquatic ecosystems. In this work, a novel magnetic semiconductor material Ag-doped ZnFe2O4, was firstly prepared by using hydrothermal method. Subsequently, Au nanoparticles (Au NPs) were anchored onto the surface of Ag/ZnFe2O4 to construct a highly sensitive SERS substrate (denoted as Ag/ZnFe2O4-Au NPs) for sensing the trace-level RSG. The enhancement mechanism analysis reveals that the synergistic contribution of chemical enhancement from the Ag/ZnFe2O4 semiconductor, electromagnetic enhancement from Au NPs, and magnetic-field-induced coupling endows the substrate with a remarkable enhancement factor of 7.74 × 107. This proposed assay for RSG detection exhibits high sensitivity and reaches a limit of detection of 3 × 10-8 mol/L, accompanying a wide linear dynamic detection range from 6.67 × 10-5 to 6.67 × 10-8 mol/L, with correlation coefficient (R2) of 0.9830. In addition, the high stability and the excellent selectivity against the coexisting objects offer potential for real samples measurement. The developed Ag-doped magnetic semiconductor-metal composite-based SERS strategy provides a potential for PPCPs monitoring in real environmental samples.