Highly electrostatically-induced detection selectivity and sensitivity for a colloidal biosensor made of chitosan nanoparticle decorated with a few bare-surfaced gold nanorods

●Bare gold nanorods with improved detection sensitivity.●By tuning the solution pH, the resulting colloidal nanoprobes possess high specificity and sensitivity.●The colloid-type AuNR–CHC nanosensor renders a high sensing selectivity without acquiring any ligands.●The selectivity results from electrostatically-induced protein-specific interaction with the AuNRs on the colloids.

Metallic nanoparticles have been utilized as an analytical tool to detecting a wide variety of organic analytes. Among them, gold nanoparticles demonstrating outstanding surface plasmonic resonance property have been well recognized and received wide attention for plasmon-based sensing applications. However, in literature, gold-based nanosensor has to be integrated with specific “ligand” molecule in order to gain molecular recognition ability. However, “ligand” molecules, included proteins, peptides, nucleic acids, etc. are expensive and vulnerable to environmental change, in the meantime, anchoring procedure of the “ligand” molecules to gold surface may be cost-ineffective and endangered to the ligand′s activity, making a final analytic probe less reliable and risk in production capability. Here, we develop a new approach by designing a colloid-type sensor using a few “bare” Au nanorods deposited on the surface of a colloidal chitosan carrier. By tuning the solution pH, the resulting colloidal nanoprobe is capable of detecting proteins, i.e., human serum albumin and lysozyme, with high specificity and sensitivity. This new approach allows a new type of the molecular probes to be well manipulated to monitor important biomolecules for medical detection, diagnosis, and bioengineering applications.