Autofluorescence free detection of carcinoembryonic antigen in pleural effusion by persistent luminescence nanoparticle-based aptasensors

Carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) is an important biomarker in the diagnosis of cancer. The increase of CEA in malignant pleural effusion appears earlier and possesses higher clinical diagnostic value than that in the serum. Conventional fluorescent probes suffer from the interference of strong biotissue auto-fluorescence, which limits severely their applications in biology detection. Herein, a novel fluorescence aptasensor was designed with near-infrared persistent luminescence nanoparticles (PLNPs) for accurate detection of carcinoembryonic antigen in pleural effusion by FRET quenching and recovery mechanism. The strong background interference from the autofluorescence of pleural effusion samples can be effectively eliminated and extra increments of measured values originated from the background of different samples were ruled out, benefit from the long decay time of PLNPs and time-resolved fluorescence technology. The detection results show high accuracy of the measured values of carcinoembryonic antigen both in cancer and benign disease group with low detection limit up to 0.0851 pg mL −1. Furthermore, excellent selectivity from coexisting biomarker was achieved by the hybridization between the aptamer and the complementary DNA on PLNPs surface. Hence, the established near-infrared PLNPs-based aptasensors offer excellent performance with high selective, accuracy and signal-to-noise ratio for detection of carcinoembryonic antigen in pleural effusion.