Recently, Associate Professor Li Xiangmei from the School of Food Science at South China Agricultural University, in collaboration with Professor Liu Juewen from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Waterloo in Canada, for the first time combined MXene materials with lateral flow immunoassay (LFIA) platforms for highly sensitive detection of dexamethasone in animal tissues. The relevant findings have been published online in Analytical Chemistry as a cover article.
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LFIA is one of the mainstream detection methods currently, with advantages such as simplicity, efficiency, low cost, and no requirement for specialized personnel or large instrument equipment. It has been successfully applied in the fields of food safety and medical diagnostics. However, the LFIA currently used for small molecule detection mainly adopts the traditional single-signal "off" strategy, which relies on high concentrations of analytes, resulting in low sensitivity and poor quantitation, especially disadvantageous for trace detection of small molecule analytes. It also struggles to avoid interference from the external environment, affecting accuracy.
To address these issues, the fluorescence quenching mechanism has been introduced, leading to the development of LFIA with both colorimetric and fluorescent dual-signal modes to improve sensitivity and accuracy. However, these studies still face some inherent problems: low fluorescence quenching efficiency and low molar extinction coefficient, complex material preparation, and poor stability. Therefore, it is of great significance to select stable fluorescent receptors with high molar extinction coefficients, dual-spectrum overlapping fluorescence quenching capabilities, and simple preparation to construct highly sensitive colorimetric-fluorescent LFIA.
This study for the first time combines MXene materials with the LFIA platform for highly sensitive detection of dexamethasone in animal tissues. Researchers prepared Ti3C2@Au using a simple one-pot self-reduction method, which has high molar extinction coefficient, excellent fluorescence quenching ability, ultra-high dispersibility, and good biocompatibility, making it possible to perform effective and sensitive detection at low antibody levels.
This immunosensor, using dexamethasone as a research model, achieves signal calibration through the combination of "off" and "on" modes, improving the reliability of the method and opening up new horizons for the application of bio-sensors based on novel MXene materials in the field of food safety.
The above research was supported by projects such as the National Key Research and Development Program, the National Natural Science Foundation, and the China Scholarship Council Fund.
For more information, refer to the related paper: Link to Paper
