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Antibody-Free Discrimination of Protein Biomarkers in Human Serum Based on Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy
journal contribution
posted on 2018-10-19, 00:00 authored by Hao Ma, Xiaoying Sun, Lei Chen, Xiao Xia Han, Bing Zhao, Hui Lu, Chengyan HeProtein
biomarkers are very important indicators of diseases and
have great potential in cancer early diagnosis. The majority of detection
methods for protein biomarkers currently rely on specific capture
antibodies or aptamers with chemiluminescent and fluorescent labels.
Here, an antibody-free strategy for discrimination of versatile proteins
is proposed based on surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy. The SERS
spectral variation of a linker molecule, perylenetetra carboxylic
acid (PTCA), is found to directly correlate with the protein types,
according to which protein biomarkers even homologous proteins with
very similar molecular structures can be discriminated with the aid
of hierarchical cluster analysis. Furthermore, the feasibility of
the proposed approach has been proved in early liver cancer diagnosis
with clinical samples. All the results indicate that PTCA as a universal
SERS probe has great potential in rapid, accurate, and direct protein
biomarker discrimination in cancer diagnosis.