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Lateral Flow Assay Biotesting by Utilizing Plasmonic Nanoparticles Made of Inexpensive Metals─Replacing Colloidal Gold.

Veronica A Bahamondes LorcaOscar Ávalos-OvandoChristoph SikelerHeini IjäsEva Yazmin SantiagoEli SkeltonYong WangRuiqi YangKatherine Leslee Asetre CimatuOlga BaturinaZhewei WangJundong LiuJoseph M SlocikShiyong WuDongling MaAndrei PastukhovAndrei V KabashinMartin E KordeschAlexander O Govorov
Published in: Nano letters (2024)
Nanoparticles (NPs) can be conjugated with diverse biomolecules and employed in biosensing to detect target analytes in biological samples. This proven concept was primarily used during the COVID-19 pandemic with gold-NP-based lateral flow assays (LFAs). Considering the gold price and its worldwide depletion, here we show that novel plasmonic NPs based on inexpensive metals, titanium nitride (TiN) and copper covered with a gold shell (Cu@Au), perform comparable to or even better than gold nanoparticles. After conjugation, these novel nanoparticles provided high figures of merit for LFA testing, such as high signals and specificity and robust naked-eye signal recognition. Since the main cost of Au NPs in commercial testing kits is the colloidal synthesis, our development with the Cu@Au and the laser-ablation-fabricated TiN NPs is exciting, offering potentially inexpensive plasmonic nanomaterials for various bioapplications. Moreover, our machine learning study showed that biodetection with TiN is more accurate than that with Au.
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