Hybrid nanomaterial: biocolloidals

Abstract

Nanomaterials-based diagnostics have tremendous advantages over other conventional diagnostic systems in terms of sensitivity, specificity, and portability owing to the unique intrinsic properties of nanomaterials. Thus, there is a substantial need to develop and employ a broad spectrum of nanomaterials for biological and diagnostic applications. In this review, we focus on nanomaterials-assisted disease diagnosis utilizing different techniques such as photoluminescence, colorimetry, fluorescence, electrochemistry, microarray methods, surface plasmon resonance, and surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy. In these techniques, different nanomaterials, including but not limited to gold and silver materials, metal oxides, and semiconductors, were employed according to their all-purpose chemical and physical properties. As the new properties of nanomaterials are discovered, their contributions to nanobiotechnology applications are vastly increased. In this review, the features of the selected nanobiomaterials, biological tag-modified nanomaterials, and their outstanding applications for the detection of specific biotargets have been summarized according to the latest studies. Nanomaterials contribute to the fields of photo/chemotherapy and biomedical imaging in particular, since all the biological events happen within this size range and beneficiary roles of nanoparticles (NPs) are countless in biomedical applications due to their unique physical and chemical properties. However, due to the necessity of specificity and selectivity, there is a clear ambition to study bioconjugation of NPs to increase the efficiency of the targeted biological applications. Thus, the combination of the specificity and the intrinsic properties of biohybrid NPs facilitate diagnostic and therapeutic applications.