Gold nanoparticles for the development of clinical diagnosis methods

Abstract

The impact of advances in nanotechnology is particularly relevant in biodiagnostics, where nanoparticle-based assays have been developed for specific detection of bioanalytes of clinical interest. Gold nanoparticles show easily tuned physical properties, including unique optical properties, robustness, and high surface areas, making them ideal candidates for developing biomarker platforms. Modulation of these physicochemical properties can be easily achieved by adequate synthetic strategies and give gold nanoparticles advantages over conventional detection methods currently used in clinical diagnostics. The surface of gold nanoparticles can be tailored by ligand functionalization to selectively bind biomarkers. Thiol-linking of DNA and chemical functionalization of gold nanoparticles for specific protein/antibody binding are the most common approaches. Simple and inexpensive methods based on these bio-nanoprobes were initially applied for detection of specific DNA sequences and are presently being expanded to clinical diagnosis. Figure Colorimetric DNA/RNA detection using salt induced aggregation of AuNP-DNA nanoprobes.

Development of a nucleic acid lateral flow immunoassay for simultaneous detection of Listeria spp. and Listeria monocytogenes in food

“…The visualization is mediated by using carbon nanoparticles. In the past years, nanoparticles were introduced as a detection tool in bioanalytics [25], which gives an alternative to conventional enzymatic or fluorescent labels, and enables easy and clear interpretation.…”

Multifunctional Gold Nanocarriers for Cancer Theranostics: From Bench to Bedside and Back Again?

“…It is a promising field as more and improved techniques are becoming available for clinical diagnostics with increased sensitivity at lower costs (Baptista et al, 2008;Baptista et al, 2005;Doria et al, 2007b;Baptista et al, 2006).…”

“…In fact, AuNPs functionalized with ssDNA capable of specifically hybridizing to a complementary target for the detection of specific nucleic acid sequences in biological samples have been extensively used (Li and Rothberg, 2004;Mirkin et al, 1996;Cheng et al, 2006;Baptista et al, 2008;Doria et al, 2007b;Taton et al, 2000;Qin and Yung, 2007;Sato et al, 2005;Sato et al, 2003;Elghanian et al, 1997).…”

Nanomaterials for biomedical applications

“…These NPs play different roles in different sensing systems. The majority of the biosensing applications based on NPs that have been developed so far are based on gold NPs (GNPs), due to their unique optical properties and ease of use with different biomarkers in aqueous solution (Baptista et al 2008;Sperling et al 2008;Boisselier & Astruc 2009). An interesting optical property of GNPs is that their optical absorption and scattering peaks can be tuned by varying their size (at around 20 nm range) and shape; in particular these peaks can be put in the NIR optical window (800-1300 nm).…”