Nitrocellulose strip array assembled on superhydrophobic surface: An aqueous solution diffusion-localized platform for multianalyte immunogold staining assays

In this paper, an aqueous solution diffusion-localized platform (ASDLP) for multianalyte immunogold staining assays has been developed for the first time by assembling nitrocellulose (NC) strips onto a superhydrophobic polycarbonate (PC) coating with a water contact angle (CA) up to 160°. In the concept-of-proof experiments, the ASDLP was used for colorimetric detection of a human IgG model antigen based on the gold-enhanced gold nanoparticle (AuNP) label amplification. The relative concentration of the analyte captured on NC was further quantified by measuring the intensity of staining result with the use of image analysis software. The comparison study demonstrates that the white superhydrophobic PC-based ASDLP can offer preferable advantages over the commonly adopted bulky piece of NC for immunogold staining assays, in terms of the localized antibody immobilization and reagent addition, the minimization of “coffee effect”, uniformity of staining results, quantitative analysis and use efficiency of NC. Moreover, the high selectivity of a multiple antibodies-immobilized NC strip array for multiple antigens in a single sample has been further demonstrated in the multianalyte immunogold staining assay experiments.