Förster Resonance Energy Transfer from Terbium Complexes to Quantum Dots for Multiplexed Homogeneous Immunoassays and Molecular Rulers

Forster resonance energy transfer (FRET) is a non-radiative energy transfer from a donor to an acceptor in close proximity. Due to its extremely sensitive distance dependence in the 1 – 20 nm range, FRET plays an important role in nanobiotechnology. Thereby FRET can be used as signal transduction system but also for the distance estimation between donor and acceptor. The selected FRET acceptors in this work were semiconductor nanocrystals (quantum dots, QDs). This type of luminophore is well known for its superior photophysical properties. Their strong and broad absorption and their bright, narrow-band, and size-tunable photoluminescence (PL) emission make QDs ideally suited for FRET application. Combing QDs as FRET acceptors with luminescent terbium complexes (LTC) as FRET donors offers exceptionally large Forster distances of more than 10 nm. The Forster distance is characteristic of a FRET pair and is the distance at which the FRET efficiency equals 50 %. A large Forster distance is desirable as it offers the detection of biological interactions over large distances. LTC are suitable FRET donors for QDs because they provide long excited-state lifetimes in the millisecond range. This long PL decay time enables time-gated measurements for the suppression of autofluorescence and PL of directly excited QDs, which strongly increases the detection sensitivity. Additionally, the structured PL emission bands of LTCs together with the size-tunable PL emission bands of QDs make this FRET pair ideal for the application in multiplexed diagnostics, which is the measurement of multiple biomarkers in a single sample.The PhD thesis consists of two parts. In the first part the LTC-QD FRET pair was used within homogeneous FRET immunoassays for the detection of the biomarkers prostate specific antigen (TPSA), neuron-specific enolase (NSE), carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA), and epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR). The immunoassay sensitivity was optimized using different types of antibodies IgG, F(ab’)2,F(ab), and for EGFR single heavy chain antibodies, which differ largely in their size. The use of small-volume serum samples and measurements on clinical as well customized fluorescence plate readers result in picomolar detection limits for all measured biomarkers. In addition to these QD-based in vitro diagnostic tests, a detailed study of the different FRET-systems using time-resolved spectroscopy was performed. The investigation revealed the influence of the different antibodies on distance, functionality, and sensitivity of the FRET immunoassays. The study was completed by the measurement of NSE and CEA in a duplexed format and real patient samples were investigated.The second part was to use FRET for nanometric distance measurements as molecular or spectroscopic ruler. Time-resolved FRET measurements enabled the calculation of the distance between donor and acceptor. Therefore two different binding strategies were investigated to establish a close proximity between the LTC-donor to the QD-acceptor, namely biotin-streptavidin recognition and polyhistidine mediated self-assembly. A detailed time-resolved study was performed of QDs with different sizes, shapes, and surface coatings in combination with LTC bound to three different host biomolecules, which also possessed different sizes, shapes, orientations, and binding conditions. The analysis of the multi-exponential decay curves of donor and acceptor allowed to obtain information about the size, shape, and biofunctionality of the investigated QD bioconjugates. The results were in agreement with other structural analysis methods, such as transmission electron microscopy (TEM) or dynamic light scattering (DLS), but with the advantage of a homogeneous measurement with three-dimensional resolution (not possible for TEM), without the inclusion of a hydration shell (drawback for DLS), and at low concentration in the same environment as used for the biological application.