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Updated: Oct 18, 2025
Rapid Homogeneous Detection of Biological Assays Using Magnetic Modulation Biosensing System
Published on: June 13, 2010
A magneto-optical biochip for rapid assay based on the Cotton-Mouton effect of γ-Fe2O3@Au core/shell nanoparticles
Kuen-Lin Chen1,2, Zih-Yan Yang3, Chin-Wei Lin4
1Institute of Nanoscience, National Chung Hsing University, 250, Kuo Kuang Rd., Taichung, 402, Taiwan, ROC. klchen@phys.nchu.edu.tw.
Background:
In the past decades, different diseases and viruses, such as Ebola, MERS and COVID-19, impacted the human society and caused huge cost in different fields. With the increasing threat from the new or unknown diseases, the demand of rapid and sensitive assay method is more and more urgent.
Results:
In this work, we developed a magneto-optical biochip based on the Cotton-Mouton effect of γ-Fe2O3@Au core/shell magnetic nanoparticles. We performed a proof-of-concept experiment for the detection of the spike glycoprotein S of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The assay was achieved by measuring the magneto-optical Cotton-Mouton effect of the biochip. This magneto-optical biochip can not only be used to detect SARS-CoV-2 but also can be easily modified for other diseases assay.
Conclusion:
The assay process is simple and the whole testing time takes only 50 min including 3 min for the CM rotation measurement. The detection limit of our method for the spike glycoprotein S of SARS-CoV-2 is estimated as low as 0.27 ng/mL (3.4 pM).
