Combining plasmon-enhanced fluorescence with Rayleigh surface acoustic waves to quantify Carcinoembryonic Antigen from human plasma

Yuqi Huang; Shuangming Li; Venkat Bhethanabotla

doi:10.1016/j.bios.2022.114822

Combining plasmon-enhanced fluorescence with Rayleigh surface acoustic waves to quantify Carcinoembryonic Antigen from human plasma

Biosens Bioelectron. 2023 Jan 1:219:114822. doi: 10.1016/j.bios.2022.114822. Epub 2022 Oct 18.

Authors

Yuqi Huang¹, Shuangming Li¹, Venkat Bhethanabotla²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemical, Biological, and Materials Engineering, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, 33620, USA.
² Department of Chemical, Biological, and Materials Engineering, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, 33620, USA. Electronic address: bhethana@usf.edu.

PMID: 36279823
DOI: 10.1016/j.bios.2022.114822

Abstract

To improve the direct quantification of Carcinoembryonic Antigen (CEA) from body fluids by immunofluorescence, a surface acoustic wave (SAW) based biosensor was developed combined with an optimized silver nanostructure at the sensing region. Fluorescence signal amplification is achieved by patterning silver nanostructures using the rapid thermal annealing (RTA) method. In addition, the problem of background noise interference from nonspecific binding in human plasma is addressed by Rayleigh wave streaming at the immunoassay region, which shows a reduction in the limit of detection. The results show that the silver nanostructures significantly increase the sensor sensitivity by 49.99-fold and lower the limit of detection of CEA in phosphate buffered saline (PBS) solution to 101.94 pg/mL. The limit of detection of CEA biomarker in human plasma was successfully brought down to 11.81 ng/mL by reducing background noise using Rayleigh SAW streaming. This allows for a point-of-need sensor system to be realized in various clinical biosensing applications.

Keywords: CEA; Immunofluorescence; Metal-enhanced fluorescence; Non-specific binding; Surface acoustic wave.