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Thursday, 27th August 2009 (4746 views)

A new sensor system incorporating gold nanoparticles could provide doctors with a low-cost method for gathering preliminary disease diagnostic information that eliminates unnecessary testing.

The "chemical nose" was developed by scientists from the University of Massachusetts (UM), according to the journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Preliminary diagnostics had traditionally relied on profiling the protein content of human blood serum.

However, with over 20,000 proteins present in human serum in varying concentrations, developing an effective sensor that does not require individual receptors for each one has been a "challenging task", the publication said.

Existing detection methods can be expensive as they involve individual antibodies or mass spectrometry that focus on identifying only their target proteins.

The UM team, led by Dr Vince Rotello of the department of chemistry, found that by coating gold nanoparticles with short polymer chains, they could "tune" them to bind to particular protein types.

An additional coating of Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) was then added. Different proteins compete with the GFP to bind to nanoparticles with different surface chemistries, producing a "fluorescence profile" reflecting the concentrations of various proteins in a sample.

 

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