Lateral flow immunoassay with the signal enhanced by gold nanoparticle aggregates based on polyamidoamine dendrimer.

In order to amplify the signal in a gold nanoparticle-based lateral flow immunoassay, a simple and sensitive method utilizing gold nanoparticle aggregates as a colored reagent formed with a polyamidoamine dendrimer was developed. The results were compared with that achieved by employing the individual nanoparticles used in the conventional lateral flow immunoassay. Under the optimized experimental conditions, a detection limit of 0.1 ng mL⁻¹ for rabbit immunoglobulin G was achieved, which is almost 20-fold lower than that of the traditional method using individual gold nanoparticles. We believe that this simple, practical bioassay platform will be of interest for use in areas such as disease diagnostics, pathogen detection, and quality monitoring of food and water.