Dual-quenching mechanisms in electrochemiluminescence immunoassay based on zinc-based MOFs of ruthenium hybrid for D-dimer detection

Abstract

The successful application of electrochemiluminescence (ECL) in immunoassay for clinical diagnosis requires improving sensitivity and accuracy. Herein was reported an ECL analytical model based zinc-based metal-organic frameworks of ruthenium hybrid (RuZn MOFs) as the signal emitter. To enlarge the output difference, the quenching effect of three different noble metal nanoparticles included palladium seeds (Pdseeds), palladium octahedrons (Pdoct), and Pt-based palladium (Pd@Ptoct) core-shell were researched. Among them, Pd@Ptoct core-shell possessed higher activity and improved durability than Pd-only (NPs), they could load more protein macromolecules amicably and stabilized in the analysis system. Furthermore, since the charge redistribution owing to the hybridization of the Pt and Pd atoms in Pd@Ptoct, it could generate the electron flow maximumly from the emitter RuZn MOFs to Pd@Ptoct and result in the enhancement of quenching ECL. And the UV absorption of noble metal nanoparticles overlapped with the ECL emission of RuZn MOFs to varying degrees, which caused the behavior of resonance energy transfer (RET) reaction at the same time. This would greatly promote the sensitivity of this ECL system compared with the traditional single quenching mechanism. Based on this, a signal-off immunsensor was constructed to sensitive detection of D-dimer with linearity range from 0.001 to 200 ng mL−1, limit of detection (LOD) was 0.20 pg mL−1 and provide a further theoretical basis for the clinical application of ECL technology.