Low cost and label free Raman sensors based on Ag-coated ZnO nanorods for monitoring astronaut's health

Astronauts usually are forced to work in harsh environments, facing challenges related to living in microgravity conditions, operating in outer space, or even exploring planets with unknown pathogens and viruses. To this end, it is essential to provide astronauts easy tools to monitoring their health status with low cost and fast diagnostic methods. Indeed, undetected damages occurring at one crew member can compromise an entire mission and worst, it can cause the death for all the other crew members. In this respect, biosensors can offer valuable solutions. Among different biosensing techniques, Raman sensing can provide information on complex organic compounds like proteins, enzymes, DNA mutations etc. Here we present a low cost and totally label free Raman platform based on silver-coated zinc oxide nanostructures to reveal biomarkers and chemical alterations in human fluids like saliva or blood, without the need of sample processing.