Highly parallel, wash-free, and ultrasensitive centrifugal droplet digital protein detection in sub-microliter blood.

Abstract

The ability to efficiently detect low-abundance protein biomarkers in tiny blood samples is a significant challenge in clinical and laboratory settings. Currently, high-sensitivity approaches require specialized instrumentation, involve multiple washing steps, and lack the ability to parallelize, preventing their widespread implementation. Herein, we developed a parallelized, wash-free, and ultrasensitive centrifugal droplet digital protein detection (CDPro) technology that achieves a femtomolar limit of detection (LoD) of target proteins with sub-microliters of plasma. The CDPro combines two techniques, namely a centrifugal microdroplet generation device and a digital immuno-PCR assay. Miniaturized centrifugal devices enable emulsification of hundreds of samples within 3 minutes using a common centrifuge. The bead-free digital immuno-PCR assay not only eliminates the need for multistep washing, but also possesses ultra-high detection sensitivity and accuracy. We characterized the performance of CDPro using recombinant interleukins (IL-3 and IL-6) as example targets and reported a LoD of 0.0128 pg mL^-1. We also quantified IL-6 from 7 human clinical blood samples using the CDPro with only 0.5 μL plasma, which showed excellent agreement with an existing clinical protein diagnostic system with 25 μL plasma from those samples (<i>R</i>² = 0.98).