Two valuable research findings of viral detection have been published in ACS Applied Materials & Interface and Aggregate. Congratulations to Dr. Yin Bohan and Miss Zhang Qin!
Stimuli-responsive nanoplatforms are highly instrumental in constructing sensitive and selective viral biosensors, which are crucial to meet the urgent demand for sensitive diagnosis of viral nucleic acids such as SARS-CoV-2 genes. However, it remains challenging for SERS-based biosensors to use a sandwiching strategy to detect long-chain nucleic acids. Dr. Yin developed a magnetic-responsive substrate consisting of heteoronanostructures that control the coupling distance for ultrasensitive and highly selective detection of the N gene of SARS-CoV-2 by surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) technique. This platform magnetically modulates interparticle coupling for enhanced electric field strength and Raman signals. This study proves a new concept of manipulating DNA flexibility to control the coupling distance of metallic NPs by magnetic modulation and provides a promising strategy for detecting long-chain SARS-CoV-2 with detection limit (LoD) at 100 aM.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsami.1c21173
An AIEgen-graphene oxide (GO) nanocomposite-based assay is designed for rapid detection of SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acids. The sensing mechanism is based on two-stage fluorescence signal recovery due to fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) effect by detaching AIEgen from GO surface and restricted intramolecular rotation (RIR) effect by formation of nucleic acid duplexes. The feasibility of our platform for diagnostic application was demonstrated by detecting SARS-CoV-2 virus plasmids containing both Orf1ab and N genes with rapid detection around 1 h and good sensitivity at pM level without amplification. The first author of this work is Miss Zhang Qin.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/agt2.195