Design and Simple Assembly of Gold Nanostar Bioconjugates for Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy Immunoassays

Document Type

Article

Rights

Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence

Disciplines

1.3 PHYSICAL SCIENCES

Publication Details

Nanomaterials

Abstract

Immunoassays using Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy are especially interesting on account not only of their increased sensitivity, but also due to its easy translation to point-of-care formats. The bases for these assays are bioconjugates of polyclonal antibodies and anisotropic gold nanoparticles functionalized with a Raman reporter. These bioconjugates, once loaded with the antigen analyte, can react on a sandwich format with the same antibodies immobilized on a surface. This surface can then be used for detection, on a microfluidics or immunochromatographic platform. Here, we have assembled bioconjugates of gold nanostars functionalized with 4-mercaptobenzoic acid, and anti-horseradish peroxidase antibodies. The assembly was by simple incubation, and agarose gel electrophoresis determined a high gold nanostar to antibody binding constant. The functionality of the bioconjugates is easy to determine since the respective antigen presents peroxidase enzymatic activity. Furthermore, the chosen antibody is a generic immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibody, opening the application of these principles to other antibody-antigen systems. Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy analysis of these bioconjugates indicated antigen detection down to 50 U of peroxidase activity. All steps of conjugation were fully characterized by ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy, dynamic light scattering,Potential, scanning electron microscopy, and agarose gel electrophoresis. Based on the latter technique, a proof-of-concept was established for the proposed immunoassay.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.3390/nano9111561

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

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