Exosomes are extracellular vesicles ranging in diameter from 40 nm to 160 nm. Exosomes are regarded as the next generation of cancer biomarkers because they carry a large amount of biological information of the mother cell and play an important role in intercellular communication. Traditional methods for detecting exosomes are time-consuming and low sensitivity, so it is urgent to develop new methods that are fast, sensitive and can detect multiple exosomes at the same time.
Recently, Song Yanlin's research group of the Key Laboratory of Green Printing Institute of the Institute of Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences combined the printing of one-dimensional nanochains with surface patterning to design a zoned optical biodetection chip. In this study, specific antibodies were incubated on one-dimensional nanochains using amide reactions to capture target exosome particles. It was found that when one-dimensional nanochains trap exosome particles, the color of the scattered light of the nanochains changes appreciably with the near-field enhancement induced by resonance. A series of multi-channel partition biodetection chips were prepared by designing a substrate with hydrophilic and hydrophobic patterns. Studies have shown that by using the significant infiltrative differences on the surface of biochips, a single droplet to be measured is divided into several microdroplets that do not interfere with each other, realizing the rapid differentiation of exosome samples between normal and glioma patients. This kind of zoned optical biochip has the advantages of simple operation, low cost, good specificity and stability in complex biological liquid environment, and is expected to become a new disease diagnosis method, and promote the development of liquid biopsy, health monitoring and other related fields.
The research is published in the journal Advanced Materials. The research work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Beijing Municipal Government.