Noble metal nanomaterials, with the unique characteristics including light stability, strong optical signal, good bio-compatibility and so on, have incomparable advantages over other materials. They have been successfully utilized in various scientific and living areas, with broad application prospects in the area of life science and biological medicine, attracting more and more attention all over the world. This article simply summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of fluorescence imaging, Raman imaging, and the imaging principle of dark field imaging. The dark field imaging detecting scattered light of nanomaterials can eliminate effectively the background interference of sample, which has a lot of incomparable advantages. We review the latest research progress and prospect in biological imaging of noble metal nanomaterials. With the rapid development of nanometer composite technology and the improvement of detection means, noble metal nanomaterials will be brought from fundamental scientific research into practical application. And single molecular spectroscopy and optical microscopic imaging technology has made great progress, which is likely to bring new revolution in biological imaging characterization.

noble metal nanomaterials  /  fluorescence imaging  /  Raman imaging  /  dark field imaging