Cu-DNAzyme facilitates highly sensitive immunoassay

Fast and sensitive antigen detection is important in biomedical research and development. Despite, being invented 48 years ago, the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) remains one of the most successful and widely employed bioanalytical techniques in research and clinical diagnostics due to its reliability and simplistic design. Recently, nanotechnology has offered efficient signal reporting. In spite of some improvements in these systems, there are typically increased material costs involved and the need for expensive equipment or complicated chemical processes, thus negating any possible benefits over ELISA. Herein, we communicate a simple Cu-DNAzyme system for signal transduction of a CuO nanoparticle-labeled immunoassay. The reported immunoassay amplifies signal generation similar to traditional ELISA and is fast, simple, cost-effective, and sensitive, holding promise for biomedical applications and point-of-care testing.