Nanoparticle Tracking Analysis-Based In Vitro Detection of Critical Biomarkers

Abstract

Nanoparticles emerge to be powerful probes for the sensing of critical biomarkers because of their characteristic optical/ electrochemical/magnetic properties. However, the versatility and prevalence of nanoparticle-based assays remain hampered because each kind of nanoprobe has designated properties, which requires different instruments for the readout of the signals. Herein, a versatile nanoparticle tracking analysis (NTA)-based strategy is innovatively proposed for the in vitro detection of critical biomarkers without demanding specific properties of the nanoparticles. Based on the sandwich-type immunoreaction and the duplex-specific nuclease-assisted cycling nucleic acid cleavage, the quantitative relationships are rationally built up between the level of both protein and microRNA biomarkers and the nanoparticles' number variation. Under proper conditions, NTA will provide the absolute number count and accurate size distribution of the nanoparticles in the solution phase in a real-time manner to facilely determine the level of the protein and microRNA targets. Benefiting from the intrinsic ability of NTA for grouping the nanoparticles by size and composition, the multiplexed assay of biomolecules is also achieved. Compared with the conventional nanoparticle-based biosensing systems, NTA can directly count the nanoparticles in aqueous solution, without depending on the nanoparticles' specific properties. This work remarkably improves the versatility and convenience of nanoparticle counting-based bioanalysis, inspiring the future application of NTA in biosensing.

In vitro Label Free Raman Microspectroscopic Analysis to Monitor the Uptake, Fate and Impacts of Nanoparticle Based Materials

“…Incorporation of Raman reporters enables localization of the SERS probe within the subcellular environment, and such SERS nanosensors can be designed, for example to monitor pH changes in a cell at the different stages of the endocytic pathway (Kneipp et al, 2006(Kneipp et al, , 2010Wang et al, 2008). A number of studies have described novel SERS based probes for intracellular sensing and imaging (Kneipp et al, 2009), identification of biomarkers (Zhang et al, 2020) and to monitor intracellular delivery of single gold particles via 3D hollow nanoelectrodes (Huang et al, 2019). SERS has also been employed to probe cell surface receptors associated with cancer (Kong et al, 2012), in the isolation and non-invasive analysis of circulating cancer stem cells (Cho et al, 2018), and applications in cancer detection and tumor imaging have been extensively explored (Meola et al, 2018;Ravanshad et al, 2018).…”