Ultrasensitive electrochemical detection of prostate-specific antigen by using antibodies anchored on a DNA nanostructural scaffold.

The high occurrence of prostate cancer in men makes the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening test really important. More importantly, the recurrence rate after radical prostatectomy is high, whereas the traditional PSA immunoassay does not possess the sufficient high sensitivity for post-treatment PSA detection. In these assays, uncontrolled and random orientation of capture antibodies on the surface largely reduces their activity. Here, by exploiting the rapidly emerging DNA nanotechnology, we developed a DNA nanostructure based scaffold to precisely control the assembly of antibody monolayer. We demonstrated that the detection sensitivity was critically dependent on the nanoscale-spacing (nanospacing) of immobilized antibodies. In addition to the controlled assembly, we further amplified the sensing signal by using the gold nanoparticles, resulting in extremely high sensitivity and a low detection limit of 1 pg/mL. To test the real-world applicability of our nanoengineered electrochemical sensor, we evaluated the performance with 11 patients' serum samples and obtained consistent results with the "gold-standard" assays.