Co-detection: Ultra-reliable Nanoparticle-Based Electrical Detection of Biomolecules in the Presence of Large Background Interference

Abstract

Contrary to popular belief, we report that background interference in conductimetric biochips can be exploited using a novel "co-detection" principle to significantly improve the reliability of detecting trace quantities of biomolecules. The technique called "co-detection" exploits the non-linear redundancy amongst synthetically patterned biomolecular logic circuits for deciphering the presence or absence of target biomolecules in a sample. In this paper, we demonstrate the "co-detection" principle on gold-nanoparticle based conductimetric soft-logic circuits which uses a silver-enhancement technique for signal amplification. Using co-detection, we have been able to measure a 1000 times improvement in the reliability of detecting mouse IgG at concentration levels that are 10^5^ lower than the concentration of rabbit IgG which serves as background interference.