Thermal-annealing-regulated plasmonic enhanced fluorescence platform enables accurate detection of antigen/antibody against infectious diseases

Plasmonic enhanced fluorescence (PEF) technology is a powerful strategy to improve the sensitivity of immunofluorescence microarrays (IFMA), however, current approaches to constructing PEF platforms are either expensive/time-consuming or reliant on specialized instruments. Here, we develop a completely alternative approach relying on a two-step protocol that includes the self-assembly of gold nanoparticles (GNPs) at the water-oil interface and subsequent annealing-assisted regulation of gold nanogap. Our optimized thermal-annealing GNPs (TA-GNP) platform generates adequate hot spots, and thus produces high-density electromagnetic coupling, eventually enabling 240-fold fluorescence enhancement of probed dyes in the near-infrared region. For clinical detection of human samples, TA-GNP provides super-high sensitivity and low detection limits for both hepatitis B surface antigen and SARS-CoV-2 binding antibody, coupled with a much-improved detection dynamic range up to six orders of magnitude. With fast detection, high sensitivity, and low detection limit, TA-GNP could not only substantially improve the outcomes of IFMA-based precision medicine but also find applications in fields of proteomic research and clinical pathology.

Supplementary material (UV-Vis absorption and transmission spectra of GNPs, SEM, microscopy and digital images of PEF platforms, and fluorescence images of IFMA on PEF platforms) is available in the online version of this article at 10.1007/s12274-022-5035-6.