Paper-based LRET sensor for the detection of total heavy rare-earth ions

Qiang Chen; Keren Tang; Dengwang Luo; Luodan Han; ChunXiao Yu; Yiping Shen; Qi Lin; Yiting Chen; Chunyan Li; Jinghua Chen; Jianming Lan

doi:10.3389/fchem.2022.1028441

Paper-based LRET sensor for the detection of total heavy rare-earth ions

Front Chem. 2022 Oct 4:10:1028441. doi: 10.3389/fchem.2022.1028441. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ College of Materials and Chemical Engineering, MinJiang University, Fuzhou, China.
² The School of Pharmacy, Fujian Medical University, Fuzhou, China.
³ CAS Key Laboratory for Biological Effects of Nanomaterials and Nanosafety, National Center for Nanoscience and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.

Abstract

Based on the mechanism of luminescence resonance energy transfer (LRET) and using a special single strand DNA as the recognition element, a portable paper-based sensor for the accurate detection of total heavy rare-earth ions (mainly Gd³⁺, Tb³⁺ and Dy³⁺) concentration was proposed. The RNA cleaving-DNAzyme should recognize rare-earth ions to cleave RNA on DNA duplexes linking UCNPs and AuNPs, causing UCNPs and AuNPs to approach each other, inducing LRET, which attenuated the green upconversion luminescence (UCL) triggered by the 980 nm laser. UCL was captured by a charge-coupled device (CCD) image sensor and processed with the red-green-blue (RGB) image to quantitatively analyze heavy rare-earth ions in the samples. In the range of 5-50 μmol·L-1, the sensor has good sensitivity, with the limit of detection of 1.26 μmol L^-1.

Keywords: AuNPs; DNAzyme; luminescence resonance energy transfer; rare-earth ions; upconversion nanoparticles.