Highly sensitive and quantitative biodetection with lipid-polymer hybrid nanoparticles having organic room-temperature phosphorescence

A versatile organic room-temperature phosphorescence (RTP)-based turn on biosensor platform has been devised with high sensitivity by combining oxygen-sensitive lipid-polymer hybrid RTP nanoparticles with a signal-amplifying enzymatic oxygen scavenging reaction in aqueous solutions. When integrated with a sandwich DNA hybridization assay on 96-well plates, our phosphorimetric sensor demonstrates sequence-specific detection of a cell-free cancer biomarker, a TP53 gene fragment, with a sub-picomolar (0.5 p.m.) detection limit. This assay is compatible with detecting cell-free nucleic acids in human urine samples. Simply by re-programming the detection probe, our unique methodology can be adapted to a broad range of biosensor applications for biomarkers of great clinical importance but difficult to detect due to their low abundance in vivo.

Automated summary

A versatile organic room-temperature phosphorescence-based biosensor platform has been developed, which combines oxygen-sensitive lipid-polymer hybrid nanoparticles and signal-amplifying enzymatic oxygen scavenging reaction for high sensitivity detection. When incorporated into a sandwich DNA hybridization assay, the sensor demonstrates sequence-specific detection of a cell-free cancer biomarker with a sub-picomolar detection limit. This method is compatible with detecting cell-free nucleic acids in human urine samples and can be adapted for detecting biomarkers of clinical importance.