Porous Hydrogel Encapsulated Photonic Barcodes for Multiplex MicroRNA Quantification

Abstract

The development of a highly sensitive platform for multiplex circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) detection is important for clinical diagnosis. Here, a new type of porous hydrogel encapsulated photonic crystal (PhC) barcodes is presented with integrated rolling circle amplification (RCA) strategy for multiplex miRNA quantification. As the surrounding porous hydrogel shells of the PhC barcodes are interconnected inverse opal structure with hydrophilic scaffolds, they can provide homogeneous water surrounding for the miRNA targets reaction and RCA. The encapsulated PhC cores of the barcodes can offer stable diffraction peaks for encoding different miRNAs and their RCAs during the detection. By integrating the advantages of PhC barcodes and RCA, it is demonstrated that the technology shows acceptable accuracy and detection reproducibility for the rapid quantification of lowabundance miRNAs, with the limits of detection of 20 fM. Thus, the proposed porous hydrogel encapsulated PhC barcodes provide a new platform for the multiplex quantification of low-abundance targets for practical applications.

Anisotropic structural color particles from colloidal phase separation

“…This new strategy not only ensures the monodispersity but also increases the componential and morphological diversity of the structural color particles (SCPs). Besides benefiting from their spherical symmetry, the photonic bandgaps (PBGs) of the resultant microfluidic SCPs are usually independent of rotation under illumination at a fixed incident angle, which broadens the perspective values of the structural color materials for displaying, coding, sensing, and so on (20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26). However, despite the substantial progress that has been made in SCPs, their main applications are still limited to the isotropic morphologies and photonic nanostructures, since most of the self-assembly approaches in droplet microreactors can only achieve spherical particles, which are difficult for controllable fixation, location, and orientation.…”

Microfluidic Platforms toward Rational Material Fabrication for Biomedical Applications

“…e) Structural color barcode particles formed by microfluidics for the quantification of miRNA. Reproduced with permission . Copyright 2018, John Wiley & Sons.…”

“…f) Microneedle arrays decorated with structural color barcode particles for the real‐time monitoring of different biomarkers in skin interstitial fluids. Reproduced with permission . Copyright 2019, John Wiley & Sons.…”

“…Microfluidics is versatile for producing structural color barcode micro/nanoparticles as biosensors that can be encoded with tunable or even multiple colors (Figure d) . These structural color barcode micro/nanoparticles can be formed by means of droplet evaporation, optofluidic, droplet template generation, multiple emulsification, and UV cross‐linking of photocurable resins on specifically designed microfluidic devices, demonstrating attractive potentials in the monitoring and even quantification of different biomarkers with high physiological and medical significance such as microRNAs (Figure e) and skin interstitial fluid (Figure f) . By simply functionalized with SERS‐active nanotags, structural color micro/nanoparticles formed by microfluidics can realize significantly improved sensitivity in biomarker detection due to the coupling effects .…”

Bioinspired Photonic Barcodes with Graphene Oxide Encapsulation for Multiplexed MicroRNA Quantification

“…With miRNA roles having been identified during cell proliferation or apoptosis, evidence is mounting that various diseases, including cancers, are impacted by a higher or lower expression of multiple miRNAs . In aiming to realize high‐sensitivity detection of miRNAs, several signal‐amplification strategies have been developed based mainly on the integration of various nanomaterials and molecular biology pathways, such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR), hybridization chain reaction (HCR), and so on . Among these strategies, graphene oxide (GO), a 2D carbon nanomaterial with extraordinary physical and chemical properties, is attracting widespread interest for nucleic acid quantification .…”