Elsevier

Biosensors and Bioelectronics

Volume 71, 15 September 2015, Pages 230-242
Biosensors and Bioelectronics

Replacing antibodies with aptamers in lateral flow immunoassay

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bios.2015.04.041Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Aptamer and lateral flow immunoassay were introduced.

  • Antibodies' limitations and aptamers' opportunities in LFIA were summarized.

  • Recent advances in aptamer-based lateral flow assays were reviewed.

Abstract

Aptamers have been identified against various targets as a type of chemical or nucleic acid ligand by systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment (SELEX) with high sensitivity and specificity. Aptamers show remarkable advantages over antibodies due to the nucleic acid nature and target-induced structure-switching properties and are widely used to design various fluorescent, electrochemical, or colorimetric biosensors. However, the practical applications of aptamer-based sensing and diagnostics are still lagging behind those of antibody-based tests. Lateral flow immunoassay (LFIA) represents a well established and appropriate technology among rapid assays because of its low cost and user-friendliness. The antibody-based platform is utilized to detect numerous targets, but it is always hampered by the antibody preparation time, antibody stability, and effect of modification on the antibody. Seeking alternatives to antibodies is an area of active research and is of tremendous importance. Aptamers are receiving increasing attention in lateral flow applications because of a number of important potential performance advantages. We speculate that aptamer-based LFIA may be one of the first platforms for commercial use of aptamer-based diagnosis. This review first gives an introduction to aptamer including the selection process SELEX with its focus on aptamer advantages over antibodies, and then depicts LFIA with its focus on aptamer opportunities in LFIA over antibodies. Furthermore, we summarize the recent advances in the development of aptamer-based lateral flow biosensing assays with the aim to provide a general guide for the design of aptamer-based lateral flow biosensing assays.

Section snippets

Aptamer preparation by SELEX

Aptamers are short single-stranded DNA or RNA (often DNA) ligands that can adopt specific three-dimensional conformations to combine with target analytes with high specificity and affinity in a similar way to antibodies (Ellington and Szostak, 1990, Tuerk and Gold, 1990). Aptamers usually vary in length from 10 to 100 bases, and their typical structural motifs include stems, internal loops, purine-rich bulges, hairpin structures, hairpins, pseudoknots, kissing complexes, and G-quadruplex

Principles of lateral flow assays

To provide patient-centered healthcare for more people or cut the healthcare cost, the use of point-of-care testing (POCT) has constantly increased over the past 40 years, aiming at delivering cost-effective healthcare to patients near their homes. As the dominant technologies in this review, lateral flow immunoassays (LFIAs), also known as immunochromatographic assays (ICAs) or strip tests (Dzantiev et al., 2014), are currently used for qualitative, semi-quantitative, and to some extent

Antibodies' limitations and aptamers' opportunities in LFIA

Many efforts have been made for lateral flow immunoassays to improve the performance of existing technologies including better sensitivity, reproducibility, quantification, and multiplexing capability. With continuously improved materials, reagents, approaches, manufacturing equipment, and manufacturing processes, LFIAs have evolved into a true laboratory-based system when a whole new generation of facilitative technologies is introduced. LFIAs utilize the lateral flow strip as a component of a

Designing aptamer-based LFIA

Aptamers have recently attracted considerable attention in diagnostic applications due to their inherent advantages over antibodies. The use of aptamers in the lateral flow technology as an alternative to antibodies is under investigation at the time of writing. Similar to LFIA, there are also two formats, i.e., sandwich and competitive (or inhibition) formats, for lateral flow aptamer assay (LFAA). Beside this, there are also some other aptamer-based LF methods with distinctive nucleic acid

Future prospect

In the past two decades, aptamers has been remarkably developed in analytical chemistry. Aptamers have been shown to be versatile and effective as molecular probes in designing various types of electrochemical (Ho et al., 2012, Liu et al., 2012), fluorescence (Kim et al., 2012, Zhang et al., 2011), chemiluminescence (Freeman et al., 2011), or colorimetric (Zhu et al., 2010) sensing schemes for a broad spectrum of targets with high sensitivity and selectivity, comparable to and sometimes even

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by International Science & Technology Cooperation Program of China (2012DFA31140). The authors express their gratitude for the support.

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