In the recent publication with the title "Sandwich Immuno-RCA Assay with Single Molecule Counting Readout: The Importance of Biointerface Design", Katharina Schmidt and Jakub Dostalek report on the development of a biosensor for early cancer diagnosis. It shows the importance of the interplay between charges of biomolecules and the biointerface to suppress unspecific binding leading to possible false positive results. Single molecule imaging of the target analyte was achieved by an enzymatic based amplification method for fluorescence enhancement, allowing the counting of bright spots thus ensuring a better performance than averaged signal output based biosensors. The detection was also successfully shown in serum samples paving the way for clinical applications.
The work was performed in collaboration with the FZU-Institute of Physics and the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry in Prague.
