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The discrimination of the type of cancer cells remains challenging due to the subtle differences in their expression of membrane receptors. In this work, we developed a multicolor cell imaging method for distinguishing the type of cancer cells with fluorophore-tagged aptamers. We found that the interaction between aptamers and cancer cells was affected by both of the sequence of aptamers and the labeled dyes. As the co-ownership of biomarkers for different cancer cell lines, the fluorophore-tagged aptamers interacted with different cancer cell lines in different degree, resulting in a distinct color to discriminate the type of cancer cells at single cell level. Taking advantage of the cross-reactive ability of the fluorophore-tagged aptamers, we could not only distinguish the cancerous cells quickly from large quantities of noncancerous cells, but also identify the type of the cancerous cells. This work has potential application for cancer diagnostic and therapy in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We developed a colorimetric sensor array with reported protein aptamers as nonspecific receptors. We found that different target proteins could make the aptamer-protected gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) exhibit different aggregation behaviors in the presence of a high concentration salt and cause various color change. On the basis of this phenomenon, we applied a series of reported protein aptamers as a receptor array obtaining a distinct response pattern to each target protein. Seven proteins have been well distinguished with the naked eye at the 50 nM level. Cancerous human cells have also been discriminated from noncancerous cells. This method is simple, label-free, and sensitive. It will broaden the application filed of plasmonic nanoparticle-based sensors and give a new direction of developing sensitive array sensing systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]