Abstract
In this work, we developed an assay to determine if an arbitrary white powder is a controlled substance, given the plasmonic response of aptamer-gold nanoparticle conjugates (Apt-AuNPs). Toward this end, we designed Apt-AuNPs with specific a response to common controlled substances without cross reactivity to chemicals typically used as fillers in street formulations. Plasmonic sensor variation was shown to produce unique data fingerprints for each chemical analyzed, supporting the application of multivariate statistical techniques to annotate unknown samples by chemical similarity. Importantly, the assay takes less than fifteen minutes to run, and requires only a few micrograms of the material, making the proposed assay easily deployable in field operations.
Highlights
Controlled substance abuse is a great public health concern that affects 5% of the world population aged 15–64 [1], with substance abuse mainly belonging to cannabis, opioid, cocaine, or amphetamine type stimulants
MO, USA), Milli-Q water was filtered with a Q-Pod from Millipore (Darmstadt, Germany), DNA aptamers were purchased from Integrated DNA Technologies (IDT) (Coralville, IA, USA)
Plasmonic sensors based on AuNPs typically function based on the disruption of particle stability due to the binding of an analyte of interest [25,26,34]
Summary
Controlled substance abuse is a great public health concern that affects 5% of the world population aged 15–64 [1], with substance abuse mainly belonging to cannabis, opioid, cocaine, or amphetamine type stimulants. Scott (or cobalt thiocyanate) test for cocaine [2], the modified Duquenois–Levine test for cannabis [3], and Ehrlich Reagents for LSD [4] These tests have proven to be invaluable to law enforcement operators in helping determining whether or not a powder found at a crime scene is a controlled substance [5,6]. NaCl) used as an input in discriminant analysis; Clustering plot based the first (30 s incubation with NaCl) used as an input in discriminant analysis; (B) Clustering ploton based on the two canonical factors These results confirm the potential of the approach developed here for designing plasmonic cross-reactive sensors based on aptamers and AuNPs. By using a simple and fast assay, the identity of an unknown can be matched unambiguously to one of six controlled substances
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