Quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) is considered the gold standard for pathogen detection. However, improvement is still required, especially regarding the possibilities of decentralization. Apart from other reasons, infectious diseases demand on‐site analysis to avoid pathogen spreading and increase treatment efficacy. In this paper, the detection of SARS‐CoV‐2 is carried out by reverse transcription loop‐mediated isothermal amplification, which has the advantage of requiring simple equipment, easily adaptable to decentralized analysis. It is proposed, for the first time, the use of palladium nanoclusters (PdNCs) as indicators of the amplification reaction at end point. The pH of the medium decreases during the reaction and, in turn, a variation in the catalytic activity of PdNCs on the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) can be electrochemically observed. For the detection, flexible and small‐size screen‐printed electrodes can be premodified with PdNCs, which together with the use of a simple and small electrochemical equipment would greatly facilitates their integration in field‐deployable devices. This would allow a faster detection of SARS‐CoV‐2 as well as of other future microbial threats after an easy adaptation.
The use of metal immunoprobes, defined as recognition molecules (e.g., antibodies) labeled with metal tags, constitutes an interesting strategy for the analysis of proteins in biological samples. Fluorescent and biocompatible metal nanoclusters (MNC) have been recently established as powerful tags for detection by spectrofluorimetry, but also by elemental mass spectrometry (MS). Detection of such immunoprobes by elemental MS allows not only the qualitative analysis of the proteins but also their absolute quantification. However, the deviation associated with the MNCs polydispersity will limit the analytical precision, particularly in those samples where the concentrations of the sought protein are very low (e.g., single cell analysis). In this work the synthesis of size monodisperse gold nanoclusters (AuNCs) is investigated by using different experimental conditions such as reaction time and temperature, solvent, reducing agent, and pH, among others. Characterization of AuNCs was performed by spectrofluorimetry, dynamic light scattering (DLS) and high resolution transmission electron microscopy (HR-TEM) measurements.
Metal nanoclusters (MNCs) have become one of the most promising nanomaterialsin the area of analytical chemistry due to their optoelectronic properties and the possibilityof bioconjugation to different types of biomolecules (e.g., antibodies). [...]
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