Radiative decay engineering-biomedical applications

Summary form only given. Fluorescence spectroscopy is a widely used research tool in biochemistry and molecular biology. Fluorescence has also become the dominant method enabling the revolution in medical diagnostics, DNA sequencing, and genomics. Metallic surfaces can have unusual effects on fluorophores such as increasing or decreasing the rates of radiative decay and the rates of resonance energy transfer (RET). We describe the effects of metallic silver island films on the emission spectra, lifetimes and energy transfer. We show that proximity of fluorophores to the silver islands results in increased fluorescence intensity.