Antibody-based donor-acceptor spatial reconfiguration in decorated lanthanide-doped nanoparticle colloids for the quantification of okadaic acid biotoxin.

With the increasing movement away from the mouse bioassay for the detection of toxins in commercially harvested shellfish, there is a growing demand for the development of new and potentially field-deployable tests in its place. In this direction we report the development of a simple and sensitive nanoparticle-based luminescence technique for the detection of the marine biotoxin okadaic acid. Photoluminescent lanthanide nanoparticles were conjugated with fluorophore-labelled anti-okadaic acid antibodies which, upon binding to okadaic acid, gave rise to luminescence resonance energy transfer from the nanoparticle to the organic fluorophore dye deriving from a reduction in distance between the two. The intensity ratio of the fluorophore: nanoparticle emission peaks was found to correlate with okadaic acid concentration, and the sensor showed a linear response in the 0.37-3.97 μM okadaic acid range with a limit of detection of 0.25 μM. This work may have important implications for the development of new, cheap, and versatile biosensors for a range of biomolecules and that are sufficiently simple to be applied in the field or at point-of-care.