ABSTRACT
Gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) have several biomedical applications in diagnosis and treating of disease such as targeted chemotherapy and in pharmaceutical drug delivery due to their multifunctionality and unique characteristics. AuNPs can be conjugated with ligands, imaging labels, therapeutic drugs and other functional moieties for site specific drug delivery application. In this present review we are discussing the synthesis, properties, and forthcoming applications of gold nanoparticle (AuNPs) which is the most studied among all other metallic-nanoparticles. Here our main focus is to explain the AuNPs application in cancer treatment. AuNPs provides non-toxic carrier system for pharmaceutical drug and gene delivery applications. Currently various anticancer drugs are available but these are cause the necrosis of cancerous cell as well as normal cells. AuNPs cause the necrosis of only cancer cells therefore we can utilize it as a delivery vehicle as well as anticancer agent.
ABSTRACT
Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causing agent of tuberculosis, comes second only after HIV on the list of infectious agents slaughtering many worldwide. Due to the limitations behind the conventional detection methods, it is therefore critical to develop new sensitive sensing systems capable of quick detection of the infectious agent. In the present study, the surface modified cadmium-telluride quantum dots and gold nanoparticles conjunct with two specific oligonucleotides against early secretory antigenic target 6 were used to develop a sandwich-form fluorescence resonance energy transfer-based biosensor to detect M. tuberculosis complex and differentiate M. tuberculosis and M. bovis Bacille Calmette–Guerin simultaneously. The sensitivity and specificity of the newly developed biosensor were 94.2% and 86.6%, respectively, while the sensitivity and specificity of polymerase chain reaction and nested polymerase chain reaction were considerably lower, 74.2%, 73.3% and 82.8%, 80%, respectively. The detection limits of the sandwich-form fluorescence resonance energy transfer-based biosensor were far lower (10 fg) than those of the polymerase chain reaction and nested polymerase chain reaction (100 fg). Although the cost of the developed nanobiosensor was slightly higher than those of the polymerase chain reaction-based techniques, its unique advantages in terms of turnaround time, higher sensitivity and specificity, as well as a 10-fold lower detection limit would clearly recommend this test as a more appropriate and cost-effective tool for large scale operations.