Sensitive sandwich-type electrochemical immunosensing of p53 protein based on Ti3C2Tx MXene nanoribbons and ferrocene/gold

Since the p53 protein is an important promising biomarker of lung tumor and colorectal tumor, it is very essential to design a highly effective mean to monitor the degree of p53 for the early clinical analysis/therapy of the related tumors. In this work, a sandwich-type electrochemical immunosensing (SES) platform is proposed for the first time to detect p53 via synthesizing Ti3C2Tx MXene nanoribbons (Ti3C2Tx Nb) and ferrocene/gold nanoparticles (Fc/Au) respectively as the sensing substrate and signal-amplifier. The superior electrical property and large surface area of Ti3C2Tx Nb are beneficial to assemble the initial p53-antibodies (Ab1), while the synthesized Fc/Au is devoted to assemble the secondary p53 antibodies (Ab2) and gives a magnified signal. By adopting the Fc molecules as the probes, the experiments reveal the response current of Fc resulted from the SES structure increases along with the p53 increase from 1.0 to 200.0 pg mL−1. A considerable low detection limit (1.0 pg mL−1) is achieved after optimizing several key conditions, it is thus confirmed the as-proposed SES mean exhibits significant application in the detection of p53 protein and other targets.