Seeing is believing - web site offers free Klarite™ samples for Raman users

The company responsible for the first ever all-in-one SERS toolkit, Mesophotonics Ltd is offering visitors to their website a free sample of its unique substrate, Klarite™.

Already used across a wide range of applications in over 150 academic and industrial laboratories worldwide, Klarite™ enhances Raman signals by several orders of magnitude enabling faster trace level molecular analysis of chemical and biological samples at lower detection limits. The free sample, pre-coated with a sample monolayer, will allow those taking up the offer to evaluate for themselves Klarite's ability to analyse trace materials at less than picogram levels using standard Raman equipment.

Professor Michael Morris at the University of Michigan who is using Klarite™ in his SERS-based research on early identification of biomarkers for osteoarthritis regards it as a major step forward for Raman spectroscopy. Morris comments; "SERS has finally become the pioneering analytical tool that it promised to be when first developed thirty years ago."

Dr Steve Allen, VP of Analytical Business at Mesophotonics explains; "Until now, SERS has only been adopted by specialist laboratories because no-one has been able to make substrates that give reproducible SERS signals. By overcoming this problem we have opened up a world of analytical possibilities."

Klarite™ has been designed and manufactured adopting the same photolithographic processes used in the semiconductor industry to enable reproducibility and large-scale production. This process, combined with the substrate's high accuracy and sensitivity makes Klarite™ an affordable, accessible tool that will support the advance of SERS as a widely recognised and deployed analytical technique.