Gold nanoparticles and bioconjugation: a pathway for proteomic applications

Abstract

In the last few years gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) became extremely interesting materials due to their enhanced optical, chemical and electrical properties. With the intention of taking advantage of those properties, the use of AuNPs has spread into a wide variety of areas such as physics, chemistry, biology, industry and medicine. More interestingly, their ability to form robust conjugates with biomolecules has given proteomics a new tool to improve aspects where the current methods to study proteins and their interactions in living cells cannot achieve the success required. In this review we present some of the current methods for AuNPs synthesis, the tailoring of their surface with ligands to improve stability and strategies to conjugate with biomolecules. Lastly, we also discuss their application in proteomic methods and recent developments in clinical diagnosis.

Bactericidal Properties of Plants-Derived Metal and Metal Oxide Nanoparticles (NPs)

“…Due to their small size and improved cell-penetrating features, NPs are extremely useful in various biomedical applications including sensing [ 33 , 34 ], imaging [ 33 , 35 ], diagnostics [ 36 , 37 ], drug/compound delivery system [ 38 , 39 ], bioconjugation [ 40 , 41 ], hyperthermia [ 42 , 43 ], and biological therapies [ 33 , 36 ] ( Figure 1 ). In the past few years, NPs have been widely used to improve sensing and imaging techniques mainly due to their remarkable localization capability [ 33 ].…”

Reducing the effective dose of cisplatin using gold nanoparticles as carriers

“…It is possible to engineer the nanoparticles to deliver drugs to specific cells or parts of the human body, although some of them can become, due to their atomic components, toxic, non-selective, and unstable (Ma et al 2015;Nath et al 2017). One of the nanoparticles that does not suffer from these shortcomings is the gold nanoparticle (AuNps) which combines ease of synthesis, chemical stability, and limited cytotoxic effects (Couto et al 2016). Thus, it has been used in signaling, in imaging and as a drug carrier, given its low toxicity (Alkilany and Murphy 2010;Craig et al 2012).…”

Functionalized Gold Nanoparticles for the Detection of C-Reactive Protein

“…Gold nanoparticles can be conjugated with antibodies either via non-covalent or covalent immobilization strategies [ 57 , 61 ]. In the first approach, antibodies are immobilized at the surface of Au NPs through electrostatic and/or hydrophobic interactions [ 13 , 54 , 55 , 56 ].…”