Rapid Detection of Staphylococcal Enterotoxin B by Two-Dimensional Molecularly Imprinted Film-Coated Quartz Crystal Microbalance

Abstract

We fabricated a two-dimensional (2D) molecularly imprinted sol-gel thin film-coated quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) for the rapid detection of staphylococcal enterotoxin B (SEB) by combining organosilanes and the template protein SEB on the surface of piezoelectric quartz crystal (PQC) Au-electrode by in-situ immobilization. The detection process was monitored by the QCM's frequency shift (Δf). The working range of this method was 1.0 × 10−1–1.0 × 103 µg/mL. The detection limit was 6.1 ng/mL, which was lower than that of the PQC immunosensor, and the detection period was within 0.5 h. The reproducibility of the imprinted film-coated QCM was satisfactory due to no significant statistical difference (P > 0.05) in the rapid detection of SEB between intra- and inter-batch. The selectivity of the imprinted sol-gel film showed that it could discriminate the template molecule from its analogues and other guest molecules. Compared with immunochip, the imprinted film-coated QCM is more advantageous in terms of simplicity, rapidity, low cost, and sensitivity. Moreover, in real sample analysis, the recoveries of this method were 89.4–106.63%, which can be considered a favorable and applicable method for the rapid determination of SEB in real samples.