Nanomaterial strategies for immunodetection

Metallic nanoparticles are playing increasingly important roles in biodiagnostic platforms. This emergence reflects the need to detect disease indicating entities at increasingly lower levels in human and veterinary diagnostics, homeland security, and food and water safety. To establish this perspective, this paper overviews our recent work using surface enhanced Raman scattering for detection of proteins, viruses, and microorganisms in heterogeneous immunoassays. It describes the assay platform, which is comprised of an antibody-modified capture substrate and gold nanoparticle-based label. The latter draws on the ability to reproducibly construct gold nanoparticles modified with a monolayer of an intrinsically strong Raman scatterer that is then coated with a layer of antibodies. This construct, referred to as an extrinsic Raman label, takes advantage of the signal enhancement of scatterers when coated on nanometer-sized gold particles and the antigenic binding specificity of the immobilized antibody layer. Challenges related to nonspecific adsorption, particle stability, and measurement reproducibility are also briefly examined.