Kolosovas Machuca, Eleazar SamuelCuadrado Conde, AlexanderOjeda Galván, Hiram JoazetOrtiz Dosal, Luis CarlosHernández Arteaga, Aida CatalinaRodríguez Aranda, María del CarmenNavarro Contreras, Hugo RicardoAlda, JavierGonzález Contreras, Francisco Javier2023-06-172023-06-172019-02-062079-499110.3390/nano9020211https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/13106Received: 20 December 2018 / Revised: 16 January 2019 / Accepted: 22 January 2019 / Published: 6 February 2019 (This article belongs to the Special Issue Biomedical Applications of Nanoparticles)In this paper, we report a fast and easy method to detect histamine dihydrochloride using gold nanostars in colloidal aqueous solution as a highly active SERS platform with potential applications in biomedicine and food science. This colloid was characterized with SEM and UV–Vis spectroscopy. Also, numerical calculations were performed to estimate the plasmonic resonance and electric field amplification of the gold nanoparticles to compare the difference between nanospheres and nanostars. Finally, aqueous solutions of histamine dihydrochloride were prepared in a wide range of concentrations and the colloid was added to carry out SERS. We found SERS amplified the Raman signal of histamine by an enhancement factor of 1.0 × 10 7 , demonstrating the capability of the method to detect low concentrations of this amine molecule.engAtribución 3.0 Españahttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/journal articlehttps://doi.org/10.3390/nano9020211https://www.mdpi.com/2079-4991/9/2/211open access543.42616-073SERShistaminenanostarsnanophotonicscomputational electromagnetismÓptica (Física)Técnicas de la imagen2209.19 Óptica Física