A fluorescent immunosensor for high-sensitivity cardiac troponin I using a spatially-controlled polymeric, nano-scale tracer to prevent quenching.

For detection of high-sensitivity cardiac troponin I (hs-cTnI<0.01ng/mL), signal amplification was attained using a rapid immunosensor with a fluorescently-labeled, polymeric detection antibody. As fluorescent molecules tend to quench when they are less than 10nm apart, a synthetic scheme for the labeled antibody was devised to control the molecular distance and so minimize the quenching effect in a single conjugate unit. To this end, we first performed novel polymerization of fluorophore-coupled streptavidin (FL-SA) with biotinylated detection antibody (b-Ab) in a stepwise manner by adding FL-SA to b-Ab five times sequentially. Relative spatial positions of the fluorophore molecules in the polymer were then distally fixed using di-biotinylated oligonucleotides and passed through a 0.45µm filter to obtain a polymer of uniform size (i.e., ~400nm in diameter). We produced polymeric tracers using two different inexpensive fluorophores, Dylight 650 and Alexa 647, and applied it to the detection of hs-cTnI spiked in human serum using a two-dimensional chromatography-based immunosensor. The tracers showed a limit of detection of 0.002ng/mL for Dylight 650 and 0.007ng/mL for Alexa 647. The standard curves linearized via log-logit transformation exhibited regression lines with correlation coefficients (R(2))>0.97. The total coefficient of variation for the overall standard curve was 3.4±3.3% for the Dylight fluorophore and 5.9±1.5% for the Alexa dye. Such performances were comparable to those of the reference systems employing sophisticated technologies, Pathfast (Mitsubishi, Japan) and i-STAT (Abbott, US), with a strong correlation (R(2)>0.91) for the concentration range <100pg/mL.