Gold nanoparticles immobilized quartz crystal microbalance biochip with ultrasonic standing wave enhancement for real-time sensing protein-ligand interaction

This study presents a novel biochip containing a gold-nanoparticles modified quartz crystal microbalance (nano-Au-QCM) sensor and a piezoelectric transducer which enhances performance by production of ultrasonic standing waves (USW). Biotin-streptavidin binding is used as a model in experiments with the developed biochip to verify that nano-Au-QCM and USW enhancement greatly improves biochip detection sensitivity (~2-fold) and reduces detection time (~50%) by increasing the effective analyte concentration. The presented design shows good promise for development into a practical commercial system for enhanced real-time in situ detection of protein-ligand interactions in medical and pharmaceutical applications.