A graphene oxide/gold nanoparticle-based amplification method for SERS immunoassay of cardiac troponin I

Cardiac troponin I (cTnI) was considered as the "gold standard" for acute myocardial infarction (AMI) diagnosis owing to its superior cardiac specificity for cardiac damage and showing little or no changes in patients with a skeletal muscle disease or trauma. Herein, a new signal amplification surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) platform was developed for recognition and detection of cTnI by using gold nanoparticles (AuNPs), graphene oxide (GO) and magnetic beads (MB). Here, antibody/Raman reporter labeled AuNP-functionalized GO were employed as both SERS nanotags and signal amplification carriers. Monoclonal antibody modified MB were applied as the capture probe and separation agents. In the presence of cTnI, sandwich type immunocomplexes, "capture probe/target/SERS nanotags", were formed through antibody-antigen-antibody interactions. Due to the strong SERS enhancement ability of the designed GO/AuNP complexes and a high binding chance between cTnI and the GO/AuNP complexes, the proposed SERS-based immunoassay could selectively detect cTnI with a high sensitivity (detection limit of 5 pg mL-1) and a good linearity was obtained in a range of 0.01-1000 ng mL-1. In addition, this method was also successfully applied for detecting cTnI in serum substitute media with a similar linear range. Furthermore, this strategy can be constructed with different kinds of antibodies and Raman reporters, and thus can be easily used for simultaneous detection of multiple biomarkers. Therefore, this proposed SERS-based signal amplification technique shows strong potential for the clinical diagnosis of AMI disease.