AIEgens Barcodes Combined with AIEgens Nanobeads for High-sensitivity Multiplexed Detection

Suspension arrays based on optical encoded microspheres have attracted great attention for multiplexed detection in gene analysis, protein profiling, early disease diagnosis, treatment monitoring and so on. However, the fluorescence stability of barcodes and detection sensitivity require further improvement to meet the increasing demands of "precision diagnosis". Methods: This work reports a novel suspension array platform based on extremely stable AIEgens (AIE33 and AIE NIR800) microbeads as barcodes and AIEgens (1,1,2,3,4,5-Hexaphenyl-1H-silole, HPS) nanobeads as fluorescent signal reporter coupled with flow cytometry for multiplexed detection. Results: Due to the excellent fluorescent signal amplification effect of the HPS nanobeads, our multiplex assay showed enhanced detection sensitivity, compared to multiplex assay using QDs nanobeads (up to 3-fold improvement) and commercial organic dye of phycoerythrin (up to 5-fold improvement) as the fluorescent signal reporters. Conclusion: Furthermore, validating experiments showed similar detection performance to the clinical gold-standard method of ImmunoCAP for allergen detection in patient serum samples, demonstrating the suspension array platform based on AIEgens microbeads with excellent fluorescence stability and AIEgens nanobeads with strong signal amplification ability is promising for high-sensitivity multiplexed bioassay applications.