Chemical-Modified Nucleotide-Based Elemental Tags for High-Sensitive Immunoassay

Anal Chem. 2019 May 7;91(9):5980-5986. doi: 10.1021/acs.analchem.9b00405. Epub 2019 Apr 22.

Abstract

Multiplex biomolecular analysis with inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) becomes increasingly important in clinical diagnosis and single cell analysis. However, the sensitivity of ICP-MS-based immunoassay is only comparable or lower than those of fluorescence methods at the present stage. Therefore, designing elemental tags with a large number of metal atoms is necessary to achieve high-sensitive detection. In this work, we proposed a new strategy to build up elemental tag loading with hundreds of rare earth ions by coupling alkyne-DNA chains with rare earth element (REE)-DOTA complexes a click chemistry reaction. There are about 2 orders of magnitude improvement in sensitivity compared with single metal-ion tags. DNA chains with multialkynyl groups were facilely prepared by PCR synthesis. Moreover, the DNA-based elemental tags own excellent water-solubility and biocompatibility. The tags would be potentially applied to mass cytometry and clinical diagnosis.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Alkynes / chemistry*
  • Humans
  • Immunoassay / methods*
  • Mass Spectrometry / methods*
  • Metals, Rare Earth / chemistry*
  • Oligonucleotides / chemistry*
  • alpha-Fetoproteins / analysis*

Substances

  • AFP protein, human
  • Alkynes
  • Metals, Rare Earth
  • Oligonucleotides
  • alpha-Fetoproteins