Natural materials with anomalous molecular machinery and hierarchies are gaining tremendous recognition in pursuit of nature-friendly sustainable supports via noble metal anchoring for the analysis of organic pollutants. Herein, for the first time we demonstrate the in situ biofabrication of AuNPs stringently tethered within the snipped human nails, materialised due to the hydroxy amino acids structured within the collagenous nail having high reductive potential and Au affinity. Material characterizations revealed firm assemblage of large truncated AuNPs including triangles, pentagons, hexagons and octagons of between 80 to 150 nm within the highly rigid and compact 3-dimensional nail, enduring durability, shelf-life and stability against diverse physicochemical environments. Further, large truncated AuNPs with sharps and edges can intensify the localized electromagnetic fields as “hotspots” for the direct SERS detection of organic analytes. This is validated by exposing real-time dye adulterants at nanomolar regimes detecting acid orange between 0.173 to 0.206 ppm in red chillies (spice) and 0.087 to 0.140 ppm of malachite green in green peas (pulse) collected from three distantly far vegetable markets in the radius ~37.28 miles. Overall, we provide a highly stable, human nail waste biofabricated Au bio-substrate as a sustainable and generalized sensing technique for the identification and quantification of unsafe molecular adulterants in food samples using SERS.

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