Surface plasmon resonance imaging sensors based on mucin - antimucin interaction

Surface Plasmon Resonance imaging (SPRi) is a label-free sensitive method, designed for the study of ultrathin layers of biomolecules and biomolecular interactions. It can detect the presence of biomolecules on modified metallic surfaces by monitoring the change of the local reflectivity, without using molecular labels. This work reports our efforts in designing a biosensor based on the antibody-antigen bioaffinity, as possible tool for non-invasive early tumour diagnose. Mucin is a good candidate as cancer marker protein, since it could be correlated with different type of tumours. In this work, antimucin antibodies are successfully used for the development of SPRi sensors for identifying mucin overexpression. Antibody immobilisation was performed after self assembled thiol monolayers were created onto gold SPRi chips. Atomic Force Microscopy, X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy, SPR and SPRi were used as analysis methods.