Label-Free Efficient and Accurate Detection of Cystic Fibrosis Causing Mutations Using an Azimuthally Rotated GC-SPR Platform

Plasmonic nanosensors are candidates for the development of new sensors with low detection limits, high sensitivity, and specificity for target detection: these characteristics are of critical importance in the screening of mutations responsible for inherited diseases. In this work, we focused our study on the detection of some of the most frequent mutations responsible for cystic fibrosis (CF) among the Italian population. For the detection of the CF mutations we adopted a recently developed and highly sensitive Grating Coupled–Surface Plasmon Resonance (GC-SPR) enhanced spectroscopy method for label-free molecular identification exploiting a conical illumination configuration. Gold sinusoidal gratings functionalized with heterobifunctional PEG were used as sensing surfaces, and the specific biodetection was achieved through the coupling with DNA hairpin probes designed for single nucleotide discrimination. Such substrates were used to test unlabeled PCR amplified homozygous wild type (wt) and heterozygous samples, deriving from clinical samples, for the screened mutations. Hybridization conditions were optimized to obtain the maximum discrimination ratio (DR) between the homozygous wild type and the heterozygous samples. SPR signals obtained from hybridizing wild type and heterozygous samples show DRs able to identify univocally the correct genotypes, as confirmed by fluorescence microarray experiments run in parallel. Furthermore, SPR genotyping was not impaired in samples containing unrelated DNA, allowing the platform to be used for the concomitant discrimination of several alleles also scalable for a high throughput screening setting.