Highly sensitive immunoassay based on immunogold-silver amplification and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometric detection.

In this work, we demonstrated a highly sensitive inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometric (ICPMS) method for the determination of human carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA), which combined the inherent high sensitivity of elemental mass spectrometric measurement with the signal amplification of catalytic silver deposition on immunogold tags. The silver amplification procedure was easy to handle and required cheap reagents, and the sensitivity was greatly enhanced to 60-fold after a 15 min silver amplification procedure. The experimental conditions, including detection of gold and silver by ICPMS, immunoassay parameters, silver amplification parameters, analytical performance, and clinical serum samples analysis, were investigated. The ICPMS Ag signal intensity depends linearly on the logarithm of the concentration of human CEA over the range of 0.07-1000 ng mL(-1) with a limit of detection (LOD, 3σ) of 0.03 ng mL(-1) (i.e., 0.15 pM). The LOD of the proposed method is around 2 orders of magnitude lower than that by the widely used enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and 1 order of magnitude lower than that by clinical routine chemiluminescence immunoassay (CLIA) or time-resolved fluoroimmunoassay (TRFIA) and conventional ICPMS immunoassay. The present strategy was applied to the determination of human CEA in clinical human serum samples, and the results were in good agreement with those obtained by chemiluminescence immunoassay.