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Highly sensitive nanozyme strip: an effective tool for forensic material evidence identification

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Abstract

During criminal case investigations, blood evidence tracing is critical for criminal investigation. However, the blood stains are often cleaned or covered up after the crime, resulting in trace residue and difficult tracking. Therefore, a highly sensitive and specific method for the rapid detection of human blood stains remains urgent. To solve this problem, we established a nanozyme-based strip for rapid detection of blood evidence with high sensitivity and specificity. To construct reliable nanozyme strips, we synthesized CoFe2O4 nanozymes with high peroxidase-like activity by scaling up to gram level, which can be supplied for six million tests, and conjugated antibody as a detection probe in nanozyme strip. The developed CoFe2O4 nanozyme strip can detect human hemoglobin (HGB) at a concentration as low as 1 ng/mL, which is 100 times lower than the commercially available colloidal gold strips (100 ng/mL). Moreover, this CoFe2O4 nanozyme strip showed high generality on 12 substrates and high specificity to human HGB among 13 animal blood samples. Finally, we applied the developed CoFe2O4 nanozyme strip to successfully detect blood stains in three real cases, where the current commercial colloidal gold strip failed to do. The results suggest that the CoFe2O4 nanozyme strip can be used as an effective on-scene detection method for human blood stains, and can further be used as a long-term preserved material evidence for traceability inquiry.

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 82072324), the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2019YFA0709200), National Natural Science Foundation of China Foundation of Innovative Research Group grant (No. 22121003) and the Chongqing Special Key Project of Technological Innovation and Application Development (No. cstc2019jscx-gksbX0053).

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Author notes

  1. Juanji Hong, Zhanjun Guo, and Dihan Duan contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Experimental Center of Advanced Materials, School of Materials Science & Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China

    Juanji Hong, Zhanjun Guo, Minmin Liang & Demin Duan

  2. College of Bioscience and Biotechnology, Shenyang Agricultural University, Shenyang, 110866, China

    Dihan Duan & Yi Zhang

  3. Chongqing kangjuquanhong biology science and technology Co., ltd, Chongqing, 400026, China

    Xin Chen & Demin Duan

  4. Key Laboratory of Forensic Genetics, Institute of Forensic Science, Ministry of Public Security, Beijing, 100038, China

    Yongjiu Li, Zheng Tu & Lei Feng

  5. CAS Engineering Laboratory for Nanozyme, Key Laboratory of Biomacromolecules, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academic of Science, Beijing, 100101, China

    Lei Chen, Xiyun Yan, Lizeng Gao & Demin Duan

Authors
  1. Juanji Hong
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  2. Zhanjun Guo
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  10. Xiyun Yan
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Xiyun Yan, Lizeng Gao, Minmin Liang or Demin Duan.

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Hong, J., Guo, Z., Duan, D. et al. Highly sensitive nanozyme strip: an effective tool for forensic material evidence identification. Nano Res. 17, 1785–1791 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-023-6012-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-023-6012-4

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