Ultrasensitive Apurinic/Apyrimidinic Endonuclease 1 Immunosensing Based on Self-Enhanced Electrochemiluminescence of a Ru(II) Complex

An alternative "signal on" immunosensor for ultrasensitive detection of apurinic/apyrimidinic endonuclease 1 (APE-1) was designed utilizing the self-enhanced electrochemiluminescence (ECL) of a novel Ru(II) complex functionalized coil-like nanocomposite as signal labels. The desirable self-enhanced ECL luminophore was achieved by combining the coreactant of poly(ethylenimine) (PEI) and the luminophor of bis(2,2′-bipyridine)-5-amino-1,10-phenanthroline ruthenium(II) [Ru(bpy)2(5-NH2-1,10-phen)2+] to form one novel Ru(II) complex, which exhibited significantly enhanced ECL efficiency and stability. Moreover, the carbon nanotubes (CNTs) were employed as nanocarriers for self-enhanced Ru(II) complex loading via π–π stacking to obtain the coil-like nanocomposite to act as signal probe. Compared with traditional ECL immunoassay, our proposed strategy is simple and sensitive, avoiding the adding of any coreactant into testing solution for signal amplification, and shows a detection limit down to subfemtogram per milliliter level under the optimized experimental condition.