Biosensor for Point-of-Care Analysis of Immunoglobulins in Urine by Metal Enhanced Fluorescence from Gold Nanoparticles

Biosensors are easy-to-use and cost-effective devices that are emerging as an attractive tool, not only in settling diagnosis or in disease monitoring, but also in mass screening tests, a timely topic that impacts on daily life of the whole society. Nanotechnologies lend themselves to the development of highly sensitive devices whose realization has become a very interdisciplinary topic. Relying on the enhancement of the fluorescence signal detected at the surface of patterned gold nanoparticles, we report the behavior of an analytical device in detecting immunoglobulins in real urine samples that shows a limit of detection of approximately 8 μg/L and a linear range of 10-100 μg/L well below the detection limit of nephelometric method, which is the reference method for this analysis. These performances have been reached thanks to an effective surface functionalization technique and can be improved even more if superydrophobic features of the substrate we produce will be exploited. Since the analyte recognition is realized by antibodies the specificity is very high and, in fact, no interference has been detected by other compounds also present in the real urine samples. The device has been assessed on serum samples by comparing IgG concentrations values obtained by the biosensor with those provided by a nephelometer. In this step we found that our approach allows the analysis of the whole blood without any pretreatment; moreover, it is inherently extendable to the analysis of most biochemical markers in biological fluids.