Tobacco Mosaic Virus with Peroxidase-Like Activity for Cancer Cell Detection through Colorimetric Assay

Cell-based ELISA (CELLISA) has been widely used in disease diagnosis due to its simplicity and low cost. Recently, peroxidase-like nanomaterials have emerged as promising systems for CELLISA applications. In this work, tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) was simultaneously tailored with peroxidase-like inorganic nanoparticles (platinum nanoparticles) and cancer cell target groups (folic acid, FA) to obtain TMV-FA-Pt nanoparticles for cancer cell detection. Induced by the uniformly distributed reactive groups and well-defined structure of the TMV particle, platinum nanoparticles could be grown in situ on the exterior surface of TMV with excellent monodispersity and uniform spatial distribution. Meanwhile, FA with a PEG₁₀₀₀ linker was successfully conjugated to the coat proteins of TMV through the Cu(I)-catalyzed alkyne-azide cycloaddition reaction, an efficient "click" chemistry. Our study demonstrated that the resultant TMV-FA-Pt had specific affinity to cancer cells and was successfully used to detect cancer cells through CELLISA. Less than 1.0 × 10⁴ cells/mL of cancer cells could be readily detected.