The general approach for site-oriented immobilization of antibodies onto gold supports is reported. The immobilization is carried out using the native sulfide groups of immunoglobulin (IgG). To liberate the thiol groups, the intact IgG was split into two half-IgG fragments without destruction of the binding site of the antibody. The immobilization of half-IgG fragments on the gold surface was carried out by simple adsorption. The antigen binding capacity of the half-IgG modified gold supports is similar to that of the gold surfaces with the traditionally linked antibodies and is much higher than for nonspecifically adsorbed intact IgGs. The immobilized antibodies, according to the proposed approach, maintain high antigen binding constants. The immobilization procedure provides orientation of IgG fragments in terms of the similar distance between the binding site of the antibody and the surface of the gold support, which does not cause the distribution of the apparent affinity constants. The high operational stability of half-IgG modified gold electrodes makes them applicable for analytical applications.

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Clean polycrystalline gold electrodes were modiÐed with native glycosylated horseradish peroxidases (HRP) or two di †erent recombinant (carbohydrate free) HRPs ; recombinant wild-type HRP (rec-HRP) and recombinant HRP containing a six histidine-tag at the C-terminus of the polypeptide chain (rec-HRP-His), respectively. Only the electrodes modiÐed with the recombinant HRPs exhibited high current responses to due to H 2 O 2 relatively rapid direct electron transfer (ET) between recombinant HRP and gold. The absence of a carbohydrate shell on rec-HRP and the additionally existing histidine-tag on rec-HRP-His improved the electrode sensitivity to by more than 100 times if H 2 O 2 compared with the response observed at gold modiÐed with native HRP. Rotating disk electrode experiments indicated that the heterogeneous electron transfer rates are equal to 4.7 and 7.5 s~1 for direct electron transfer between the gold electrode and rec-HRP or rec-HRP-His, respectively.

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Oligonucleotide microarrays are considered today to be one of the most efficient methods of gene diagnostics. The capability of atomic force microscopy (AFM) to characterize the three-dimensional morphology of single molecules on a surface allows one to use it as an effective tool for the 3D analysis of a microarray for the detection of nucleic acids. The high resolution of AFM offers ways to decrease the detection threshold of target DNA and increase the signal-to-noise ratio. In this work, we suggest an approach to the evaluation of the results of hybridization of gold nanoparticle-labeled nucleic acids on silicon microarrays based on an AFM analysis of the surface both in air and in liquid which takes into account of their three-dimensional structure. We suggest a quantitative measure of the hybridization results which is based on the fraction of the surface area occupied by the nanoparticles.