Enlargement of Gold Nanoparticles for Sensitive Immunochromatographic Diagnostics of Potato Brown Rot.

Lateral flow immunoassay (LFIA) is a convenient tool for rapid field-based control of various bacterial targets. However, for many applications, the detection limits obtained by LFIA are not sufficient. In this paper, we propose enlarging gold nanoparticles' (GNPs) size to develop a sensitive lateral flow immunoassay to detect Ralstonia solanacearum. This bacterium is a quarantine organism that causes potato brown rot. We fabricated lateral flow test strips using gold nanoparticles (17.4 ± 1.0 nm) as a label and their conjugates with antibodies specific to R. solanacearum. We proposed a signal enhancement in the test strips' test zone due to the tetrachloroauric (III) anion reduction on the GNP surface, and the increase in size of the gold nanoparticles on the test strips was approximately up to 100 nm, as confirmed by scanning electron microscopy. Overall, the gold enhancement approach decreased the detection limit of R. solanacearum by 33 times, to as low as 3 × 104 cells∙mL⁻1 in the potato tuber extract. The achieved detection limit allows the diagnosis of latent infection in potato tubers. The developed approach based on gold enhancement does not complicate analyses and requires only 3 min. The developed assay together with the sample preparation and gold enlargement requires 15 min. Thus, the developed approach is promising for the development of lateral flow test strips and their subsequent introduction into diagnostic practice.

Alarm lateral flow immunoassay for detection of the total infection caused by the five viruses.

This study presents new type of the lateral flow immunoassay (LFIA) for multi-target analysis. A test, named alarm-LFIA, has an essentially new function that consists in notice (signaling the danger) about the presence at least one target from the controlled list without identification. The design of the alarm-LFIA assumes one test zone, which contains a mixture of antibodies, and multi-specific conjugate that binds the several targets. The alarm test is based on the novel conjugate with broaden specificity due to the immobilisation of a mix of antibodies, specific to several structurally different targets, on the surface of gold nanoparticles. For proof of concept, multi-specific conjugate to five important potato viruses (potato virus X, -M, -S, -Y and potato leaf roll virus) was fabricated using five antibodies with different specificity. The alarm-LFIA was developed for rapid detection of the total infection caused by up to five viruses. Detection limits of the viruses in potato leaf extracts are from 10 to 30 ng/mL. The alarm-LFIA was successfully used for viruses' detection in potato leaves; results were confirmed by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. The proposed approach of alarm-LFIA shows great potential for the various cases when different targets of interest can occur simultaneously or separately in samples.