Recent Advances in Electrochemiluminescence Emitters for Biosensing and Imaging of Protein Biomarkers

Abstract

Electrochemiluminescence (ECL) is a light-emitting process triggered by the high energy redox between electrochemically oxidized and reduced luminophores or some coreactive intermediate radicals, representing a blooming hot topic over decades with a wide variety of bioanalytical applications. Due to the superb sensitivity, ultralow background noise, specificity, ease of integration, and real-time and in situ analysis, ECL has been developed as a convenient and versatile technique for immunodiagnostics, nucleic acid analysis, and bioimaging. Discovering highly-efficient ECL emitters has been a promising subject that will benefit the development of sensitive bioanalytical methods with prominent potential prospects. To date, the interdisciplinary integrations of electrochemistry, spectroscopy, and nanoscience have brought up the continuous emergences of novel nanomaterials which can be flexibly conjugated with specific bio-recognition elements as functional ECL emitters for bioassays. Therefore, a critical overview of recent advances in developing highly-efficient ECL emitters for ultrasensitive detection of protein biomarkers is presented in this review, where six kinds of the most promising ECL nanomaterials for biosensing and imaging of various disease-related protein biomarkers are separately introduced with references to representative works. Finally, this review discusses the ongoing opportunities and challenges of ECL emitters in developing advanced bioassays for single-molecule analysis and spatiotemporally resolved imaging of protein biomarkers with future perspectives.

Engineered Electrochemiluminescence Biosensors for Monitoring Heavy Metal Ions: Current Status and Prospects

“…Through electrochemical excitation, the quantum dots enter the excited state and release energy when returning to the ground state to generate a luminescence signal. This method has high sensitivity and accuracy, and is suitable for environmental monitoring, biomedical research, and other fields [79].…”

A magnetic plasma Fe3O4@Cu@Cu2O photoelectrochemical sensor for the detection of fumonisin B1

“…21 Recent work with microRNAs in the detection of toxins has been particularly noteworthy. 22–26 In the present work, plasmonic nanocomposites with magnetic properties were synthesized by a simple one-pot method. Moreover, the presence of Fe 3 O 4 will result in better magnetic properties of the material.…”