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Updated: Jan 22, 2026

Electrochemiluminescence Assays for Human Islet Autoantibodies
Published on: March 23, 2018
Nanoengineered Metasurface Immunosensor with over 1000-Fold Electrochemiluminescence Enhancement for Ultra-sensitive
Chuanping Li1, Shanshan Wang2, Haijuan Li3
1State Key Laboratory of Electroanalytical Chemistry, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 5625 Renmin Street, Changchun 130022, P. R. China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, P. R. China.
Abstract:
Enhancing electrochemiluminescence (ECL) with plasmonic materials is promising but still a long-standing barrier to improve its sensitivity for ultrasensitive bioassays, due to the lack of comprehensive understanding and effective strategies to fully utilize plasmonic effects for ECL enhancement. Herein, by insulating gold nanoparticles with silica shells (Au@SiO2 NPs), and finely tuning their core/shell sizes and controlling interparticle spacing via assembling them into a dense nanomembrane, we develop a novel 2D metasurface. Due to well-controlled high density "hot spots" and 2D ordered arrangement of the unit NPs in the nanomembrane, the metasurfaced ECL electrode shows over 1,000-fold plasmonic ECL enhancement for the classical Ru(bpy)32+-tripropylamine system, which is two orders of magnitude higher than ever reported (<30-fold). Such fabricated ECL biosensor demonstrates superior detection performance for prostate-specific antigen with a detection limit of 3 fg mL-1. Our results provide understanding of plasmonic effects for ECL enhancement and will benefit for biosensor construction for ultrasensitive bioassays.
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