Thulium Nanoparticles As Mass Tags For Achieving Sensitive Detection Of Virus DNA

Metal stable isotope tagging provides the ability to analyze and detect multiple biomolecules simultaneously due to the outstanding mass spectral resolution, avoiding the spectral overlap issue in optical methods.Among metal stable isotope tags, lanthanide mass tags are considered as most promising tags because of their advantages of low biological background, high ionization efficiency, low interference of multi-atoms, and a wide variety of optional elements.However, the current research on lanthanide mass tag mainly focuses on the use of macrocyclic compounds, whose sensitivity is limited.In this work, the hot co-precipitation method to synthesize well-homogeneous thulium nanoparticles was optimized, and successfully applied them to the detection of hepatitis B virus (HBV)-DNA.The linearity ranges from 10 to 10 6 fM and the detection limit of 0.473 pM were reached.The high sensitivity could be obtained without extra signal amplification procedures, which greatly saved the labor and time cost in the whole detection process.