Issue 7, 2022

Carbon dot-based fluorescent antibody nanoprobes as brain tumour glioblastoma diagnostics

Abstract

The development of efficient and sensitive tools for the detection of brain cancer in patients is of the utmost importance particularly because many of these tumours go undiagnosed until the disease has advanced and when treatment is less effective. Current strategies employ antibodies (Abs) to detect Glial Fibrillary Acid Protein (GFAP) in tissue samples, since GFAP is unique to the brain and not present in normal peripheral blood, and it relies on fluorescent reporters. Herein we describe a low cost, practical and general method for the labelling of proteins and antibodies with fluorescent carbon dots (CD) to generate diagnostic probes that are robust, photostable and applicable to the clinical setting. The two-step protocol relies on the conjugation of a dibenzocyclooctyne (DBCO)-functionalised CD with azide functionalised proteins by combining amide conjugation and strain promoted alkyne–azide cycloaddition (SPAAC) ligation chemistry. The new class of Ab-CD conjugates developed using this strategy was successfully used for the immunohistochemical staining of human brain tissues of patients with glioblastoma (GBM) validating the approach. Overall, these novel fluorescent probes offer a promising and versatile strategy in terms of costs, photostability and applicability which can be extended to other Abs and protein systems.

Graphical abstract: Carbon dot-based fluorescent antibody nanoprobes as brain tumour glioblastoma diagnostics

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
24 jan 2022
Accepted
03 mar 2022
First published
03 mar 2022
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY license

Nanoscale Adv., 2022,4, 1770-1778

Carbon dot-based fluorescent antibody nanoprobes as brain tumour glioblastoma diagnostics

M. Ghirardello, R. Shyam, X. Liu, T. Garcia-Millan, I. Sittel, J. Ramos-Soriano, K. M. Kurian and M. C. Galan, Nanoscale Adv., 2022, 4, 1770 DOI: 10.1039/D2NA00060A

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