Nanogold/graphene as sensing platform coupled with ferrocene/gold as signal amplifier for sandwich-like voltammetric immunosensor of human chorionic gonadotropin

Zhihui Wu; Heng Xue; Miao Zheng; Huiyu Chen; Guolong Chen; Liangpu Xu

Nanogold/graphene as sensing platform coupled with ferrocene/gold as signal amplifier for sandwich-like voltammetric immunosensor of human chorionic gonadotropin

Am J Transl Res. 2022 Jun 15;14(6):3972-3979. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Zhihui Wu¹, Heng Xue¹, Miao Zheng¹, Huiyu Chen¹, Guolong Chen², Liangpu Xu³

Affiliations

¹ Department of Laboratory Medicine, Fujian Maternity and Child Health Hospital, Affiliated Hospital of Fujian Medical University Fuzhou 350001, Fujian, China.
² Department of Child Healthcare Centre, Fujian Maternity and Child Health Hospital, Affiliated Hospital of Fujian Medical University Fuzhou 350001, Fujian, China.
³ Department of The Prenatal Diagnosis Center, Fujian Maternity and Child Health Hospital, Affiliated Hospital of Fujian Medical University, Fujian Key Laboratory for Prenatal Diagnosis and Birth Defect Fuzhou 350001, Fujian, China.

PMID: 35836878
PMCID: PMC9274591

Abstract

An effective method to detect human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) is of significance for early pregnancy testing and clinical diagnosis of non-pregnancy related diseases. Herein, a sensitive sandwich-like electrochemical immunosensor of hCG was constructed by introducing nanogold/graphene (Au/GNS) hybrids and ferrocene/gold nanoparticles (Fc/Au) as the sensing platform and signal amplifier, respectively. In this sensing platform, the Au/GNS hybrid was dedicated to increasing the loading capacity of primary antibody (Ab₁) and accelerate the electron transport, and Au is devoted to assembling secondary antibodies (Ab₂) and Fc derivative (Fc-SH) to fabricate signal amplifier (Ab₂-AuNPs-Fc). By selecting Fc as the signal probe, results revealed that peak currents increased when the special recognition among Ab₁, hCG, and Ab₂ occurred. A novel and sensitive sandwich-like immunosensor of hCG was thus constructed. After optimizing various testing conditions, a wide linearity from 0.005 to 7.0 ng mL^-1 and a low detection limit of 1.0 pg mL^-1 were achieved for hCG analysis, suggesting this method is useful for hCG analysis.

Keywords: Human chorionic gonadotropin; biomarker; electrochemical sensing; hCG; pregnancy testing.