Lei Zhang,1,* Bing Wang,2,* Guo Yin,2 Jue Wang,2 Ming He,3 Yuqi Yang,4 Tiejie Wang,2 Ting Tang,3 Xie-An Yu,2 Jiangwei Tian1 1State Key Laboratory of Natural Medicines, Jiangsu Key Laboratory of TCM Evaluation and Translational Research, School of Traditional Chinese Pharmacy, China Pharmaceutical University, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, 211198, People’s Republic of China; 2NMPA Key Laboratory for Bioequivalence Research of Generic Drug Evaluation, Shenzhen Institute for Drug Control, Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, 518057, People’s Republic of China; 3Dermatology Department, The First Affiliated Hospital of Guizhou University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Guiyang, Guizhou Province, 550002, People’s Republic of China; 4School of Basic Medicine, Guizhou University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Guiyang, Guizhou Province, 550002, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Xie-An Yu; Jiangwei Tian, Email yuxieanalj@126.com; jwtian@cpu.edu.cnIntroduction: Urinary tract infections (UTI) are one of the most serious human bacterial infections affecting millions of people every year. Therefore, simple and reliable identification of the urinary tract pathogenic bacteria within a few minutes would be of great significance for diagnosis and treatment of clinical patients with UTIs. In this study, the fluorescence sensor was reported to guide the detection of urinary tract bacterial infections rapidly.Methods: The Ami-AuNPs-DNAs sensor was fabricated by the amino-modified Au nanoparticles (Ami-AuNPs) and six DNAs signal molecules, which bound to the urinary tract pathogenic bacteria and generated corresponding response signals. Further, based on the collected response signals, identification was performed by principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA). The Ami-AuNPs and Ami-AuNPs-DNAs were characterized by transmission electron microscopy, UV−vis absorption spectrum, Fourier transform infrared spectrum, dynamic light scattering and zeta potentials. Thereafter, the Ami-AuNPs-DNAs sensor was used to discriminate and identify five kinds of urinary tract pathogenic bacteria. Moreover, the quantitative analysis performance towards individual bacteria at different concentrations were also evaluated.Results: The Ami-AuNPs-DNAs sensor were synthesized successfully in terms of spherical, well-dispersed and uniform in size, which could well discriminate five main urinary tract pathogenic bacteria with unique fingerprint-like patterns and was sufficiently sensitive to determine individual bacteria with a detection limit to 1× 107 cfu/mL. Furthermore, the sensor had also been successfully applied to identify bacteria in urine samples collected from clinical UTIs.Conclusion: The developed fluorescence sensor could be applied to rapid and accurate discrimination of urinary tract pathogenic bacteria and holds great promise for the diagnosis of the disease caused by bacterial infection.Keywords: fluorescence sensor, rapid and accurate identification, point-of-care testing, bacterial infection, urinary tract infections
