Beyond Spheres: Evaluating Gold Nano-Flowers and Gold Nano-Stars for Enhanced Aflatoxin B1 Detection in Lateral Flow Immunoassays

The lateral flow immunoassay (LFIA) is a widely utilized, rapid diagnostic technique characterized by its short analysis duration, cost efficiency, visual result interpretation, portability and suitability for point-of-care applications. However, conventional LFIAs have limited sensitivity, a challenge that can be overcome by the introduction of gold nanoparticles, which provide enhanced sensitivity and selectivity (compared, for example, to latex beads or carbon nanoparticles) for the detection of target analytes, due to their optical properties, chemical stability and ease of functionalization. In this work, gold nanoparticle-based LFIAs are developed for the detection of aflatoxin B1, and the relative performance of different morphology particles is evaluated. LFIA using gold nano-labels allowed for aflatoxin B1 detection over a range of 0.01 ng/mL-100 ng/mL. Compared to spherical gold nanoparticles and gold nano-flowers, star-shaped gold nanoparticles show increased antibody binding efficiency of 86% due to their greater surface area. Gold nano-stars demonstrated the highest sensitivity, achieving a limit of detection of 0.01ng/mL, surpassing the performance of both spherical gold nanoparticles and gold nano-flowers. The use of star-shaped particles as nano-labels has demonstrated a five-fold improvement in sensitivity, underscoring the potential of integrating diverse nanostructures into LFIA for significantly improving analyte detection. Moreover, the robustness and feasibility of gold nano-stars employed as labels in LFIA was assessed in detecting aflatoxin B1 in a wheat matrix. Improved sensitivity with gold nano-stars holds promise for applications in food safety monitoring, public health diagnostics and rapid point-of-care diagnostics. This work opens the pathway for further development of LFIA utilizing novel nanostructures to achieve unparallel precision in diagnostics and sensing.