Metallic nanocrystallites-incorporated ordered mesoporous carbon as labels for a sensitive simultaneous multianalyte electrochemical immunoassay

This work reports on a facile, novel multianalyte electrochemical immunoassay for simultaneous detection of a-fetoprotein (AFP) and human epidermal growth factor receptor type-2 (HER-2) using metal-containing nanomaterials confined in the ordered mesoporous carbon matrix (OMC-M) as labels. Well-dispersed uniform metallic nanocrystallites incorporated OMC materials were fabricated through a simple, economical, and green preparative strategy toward phenolic resol as a carbon source and metal nitrate as metal sources. The large amount of metallic nanocrystallites loading on the OMC nanomaterials, greatly amplified the detection signals, and the good biocompatibility of carbon nanotubes-chitosan retained excellent stability for the sandwich-type immunoassay. Under optimal experimental conditions, the proposed immunoassay exhibited high sensitivity and selectivity for the detection of analytes, providing a better linear response range from 0.001 to 150 ng/mL for AFP and for HER-2, with a lower limit of detectionof 0.6 pg/mL and 0.35 pg/mL (S/N=3), respectively. The immunosensor exhibited convenience, low cost, rapidity, good specificity, acceptable stability and reproducibility. Moreover, satisfactory results were obtained for the determination of AFP and HER-2 in real human serum samples, indicating that the developed immunoassay has the potential to find application in clinical detection of AFP and HER-2 and other tumor markers as an alternative approach.