{"doi":"10.1101/2023.09.13.557660","title":"Picomolar-Level Sensing of Cannabidiol by Metal Nanoparticles Functionalized with Chemically Induced Dimerization Binders","abstract":"Abstract Simple and fast detection of small molecules is critical to health and environmental monitoring. Methods for chemical detection often use mass spectrometers or enzymes; the former relies on expensive equipment and the latter is limited to those that can act as enzyme substrates. Affinity reagents like antibodies can target a variety of small-molecule analytes, but the detection requires successful design of chemically conjugated targets or analogs for competitive binding assays. Here, we developed a generalizable method for highly sensitive and specific in-solution detection of small molecules, using cannabidiol (CBD) as an example. Our sensing platform uses gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) functionalized with a pair of chemically induced dimerization (CID) nanobody binders (nano-binders), where CID triggers AuNPs aggregation and sedimentation in the presence of CBD. Despite moderate binding affinities of the two nano-binders to CBD ( K D s of ∼6 and ∼56 µM), a scheme consisting of CBD-AuNP pre-analytical incubation, centrifugation, and electronic detection (ICED) was devised to demonstrate a high sensitivity (limit of detection of ∼100 picomolar) in urine and saliva, a relatively short assay time (∼2 hours), a large dynamic range (5 logs), and a sufficiently high specificity to differentiate CBD from its analog, tetrahydrocannabinol. The high sensing performance was achieved with the multivalency of AuNP sensing, the ICED scheme that increases analyte concentrations in a small assay volume, and a portable electronic detector. This sensing system is readily coupled to other binders for wide molecular diagnostic applications.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2023,"id":400793,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9538,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":822291,"name":"Shoukai Kang","orcid":"0000-0002-6685-1858","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":822944,"name":"Xiahui Chen","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":822295,"name":"Liangcai Gu","orcid":"0000-0002-8232-6025","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":822296,"name":"Chao Wang","orcid":"0000-0001-5020-961X","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":873052,"name":"Md Ashif Ikbal","orcid":null,"position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":31,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:20:04.010538Z","pmid":"37745324","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}