Dynamically Tunable Chemiluminescence of Luminol-Functionalized Silver Nanoparticles and Its Application to Protein Sensing Arrays

It is still a great challenge to develop an array-based sensing system that can obtain only multiparameters, according to a single experiment and device. The role of conventional chemiluminescence (CL) in biosensing has been limited to a signal transducer in which a single signal (CL intensity) can be obtained for quantifying the concentrations of analytes. In this work, we have developed an dynamically tunable CL system, based on the reaction of luminol-functionalized silver nanoparticles (luminol-AgNPs) with H2O2, which could be tunable via adjusting various conditions such as the concentration of H2O2, pH value, and addition of protein. A single experiment operation could obtain multiparameters including CL intensity, the time to appear CL emission and the time to reach CL peak value. The tunable, low-background, and highly reproducible CL system based on luminol-AgNPs is applied, for the first time, as a sensing platform with trichannel properties for protein sensing arrays by principal component analysis. Identification of 35 unknowns demonstrated a success rate of >96%. The developed sensing arrays based on the luminol-AgNPs provide a new way to use nanoparticles-based CL for the fabrication of sensing arrays and hold great promise for biomedical application in the future.