Saccharide Sensing Using Gold and Silver Nanoparticles-A Review

Abstract

We review new methodologies for glucose sensing from our laboratories based on the specific biological interactions between Con A, dextran-coated gold nanoparticles and glucose, and the interactions between dextran, glucose, and boronic-acid capped silver nanoparticles in solution. Our new approaches promise new tunable glucose sensing platforms. Dextran-coated gold nanoparticles were aggregated with the addition of Con A resulting in increase an in absorbance of nanoparticles at 650 nm, where the post-addition of glucose caused the dissociation of the aggregates and thus a decrease in the absorbance at 650 nm. The interaction of glucose and dextran with boronic acid-capped silver nanoparticles in solution resulted in enhanced luminescence intensity cumulatively due to surfaceenhanced fluorescence and the decrease in absorbance at 400 nm, with an increase in absorbance at 640 nm. Lifetime measurements were used to distinguish the contribution from the surface-enhanced fluorescence. TEM was employed to assess the aggregation of nanoparticles.

Silver Nanoparticles: Sensing and Imaging Applications

“…Silver nanoparticles have also demonstrated their potential in applications such as the development of solid substrate-based RNA capture assays (Aslan et al, 2006), label-free bioassays by means of enhancement of tryptophan fluorescence in proteins (Szmacinski et al, 2009), the detection of glucose (Aslan et al, 2004) and the development of a MEF ratiometric pH sensor, using a pH-sensitive fluorophore (Aslan et al, 2005).…”

Colorimetric Sensor Design

“…Apart from DNA, metal nanoparticle aggregation schemes have found application in detecting various other biomolecules [103][104][105][106][107][108][109][110][111]. A type of competition assay using GNPs was developed by the Geddes group to sense glucose [112,113]. In this work, GNPs were coated with dextran and then aggregated using Con A.…”

Gold nanoparticles chemisorbed by a terphenyldithiol self-assembled monolayer for fabrication of a protein biosensor

“…Of particular interest is their tunable electronic, magnetic, and photonic behavior, because of quantum confinement effects, with nanoparticle and nanoparticle clusterbased devices being envisaged as the next generation in electronics miniaturization [13][14][15]. Silver and gold nanoparticles and nano-objects have recently had a substantial effect on biological assays, detection, labeling, and sensing [16,17].…”