Fluorescent silver nanoparticle based highly sensitive immunoassay for early detection of HIV infection

• Published in: RSC advances Vol. 7; no. 32; pp. 19863 - 19877
• Main Authors: Kurdekar, Aditya Dileep, Chunduri, L. A. Avinash, Chelli, Sai Manohar, Haleyurgirisetty, Mohan Kumar, Bulagonda, Eswarappa Pradeep, Zheng, Jiwen, Hewlett, Indira K., Kamisetti, Venkataramaniah
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01-01-2017
• Subjects: Antigens; Fluorescence; Human immunodeficiency virus; Immunoassay; Nanoparticles; Nanostructure; Pathogens; Sensitivity
• ISSN: 2046-2069; 2046-2069
• DOI: 10.1039/C6RA28737A

For the first time, we have engineered streptavidin labeled fluorescent silver nanoparticles for their application in immunosensing of biomolecules which will significantly increase sensitivity without compromising the specificity. A computational perspective for understanding the efficiency of the conjugation process is provided as a proof of concept. The fluorescence based sandwich immunoassay was demonstrated to detect HIV-1 p24 antigen in clinical specimens with improved sensitivity and specificity. The detection range of the fluorescent silver nanoparticle-based immunoassay (FSNIA) was found to be between 10 and 1000 pg mL
−1
in a linear dose dependent manner. False positives were not observed with plasma samples from healthy adults (HIV
−ve
), hepatitis B (HBV
+ve
) and hepatitis C (HCV
+ve
). Plasma samples that were HIV
−ve
showed no interference with detection of HIV-1 p24 antigen. This technology can be used in resource limited settings and easily adopted for the detection of other pathogen antigens.