Glycosylated gold nanoparticles in point of care diagnostics: from aggregation to lateral flow.

Current point-of-care lateral flow immunoassays, such as the home pregnancy test, rely on proteins as detection units ( antibodies) to sense for analytes. Glycans play a fundamental role in biological signalling and recognition events such as pathogen adhesion and hence they are promising future alternatives to antibody-based biosensing and diagnostics. Here we introduce the potential of glycans coupled to gold nanoparticles as recognition agents for lateral flow diagnostics.

Factors influencing decisions about whether to participate in health research by people of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds: a realist review.

Objective: To develop and refine a programme theory that explains factors that influence decisions to take part in health research by people of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

Design: Realist review following a sequence of five steps: (a) scoping search and identification of programme theory; (b) evidence searching; (c) critical appraisal and data extraction; (d) organisation of evidence and (e) refinement of programme theory.

Eligibility Criteria: Documents (including peer-reviewed articles, grey literature, websites, reports and conference papers) either full text, or a section of relevance to the overarching research question were included.