Our latest work, from Mchem student (now PhD at Birmingham) Julian has been published in RSC Advances. We have a long standing interest in using plasmonic (gold) nanoparticles in biosensing. For example, during COVID we used our nanoparticle platform to identify glycans which the spike protein binds to. One useful feature of gold nanoparticles is their colour change (red to blue) when they aggregate. We have developed technology to install glycans using polymeric tethers to the gold particles allowing 'easy' deciphering of if the glycans are binding their protein partners by simple colour changes. In this latest work we set out to make a 'recipe' that a new user can follow to let them use our system in their own lab. This involved finding the optimum size, polymer length and crucially concentration of the gold to minimise false positives/negatives. We hope this paper is useful to other users who are interested in this tool.

Read the work here

Polymer-Tethered Glyconanoparticle Colourimetric Biosensors for Lectin Binding: Structural and Experimental Parameters to Ensure a Robust OutputLink opens in a new window