Capillary blood for point-of-care testing.

Clinically, blood sample analysis has been widely used for health monitoring. In hospitals, arterial and venous blood are utilized to detect various disease biomarkers. However, collection methods are invasive, painful, may result in injury and contamination, and skilled workers are required, making these methods unsuitable for use in a resource-limited setting.

Household Fluorescent Lateral Flow Strip Platform for Sensitive and Quantitative Prognosis of Heart Failure Using Dual-Color Upconversion Nanoparticles.

Heart failure (HF) is the end-stage of cardiovascular diseases, which is associated with a high mortality rate and high readmission rate. Household early diagnosis and real-time prognosis of HF at bedside are of significant importance. Here, we developed a highly sensitive and quantitative household prognosis platform (termed as UC-LFS platform), integrating a smartphone-based reader with multiplexed upconversion fluorescent lateral flow strip (LFS).

A fully disposable and integrated paper-based device for nucleic acid extraction, amplification and detection.

Nucleic acid testing (NAT) has been widely used for disease diagnosis, food safety control and environmental monitoring. At present, NAT mainly involves nucleic acid extraction, amplification and detection steps that heavily rely on large equipment and skilled workers, making the test expensive, time-consuming, and thus less suitable for point-of-care (POC) applications. With advances in paper-based microfluidic technologies, various integrated paper-based devices have recently been developed for NAT, which however require off-chip reagent storage, complex operation steps and equipment-dependent nucleic acid amplification, restricting their use for POC testing.

Distance-dependent plasmon-enhanced fluorescence of upconversion nanoparticles using polyelectrolyte multilayers as tunable spacers.

Lanthanide-doped upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) have attracted widespread interests in bioapplications due to their unique optical properties by converting near infrared excitation to visible emission. However, relatively low quantum yield prompts a need for developing methods for fluorescence enhancement. Plasmon nanostructures are known to efficiently enhance fluorescence of the surrounding fluorophores by acting as nanoantennae to focus electric field into nano-volume.