Cocaine Detection in Blood Serum Using Aptamer Biosensor on Gold Nanoparticles and Progressive Dilution

Abstract

Abstract To fight against the illegal usage of cocaine it is necessary to develop various analytical methodologies. We report here an aptamer‐based biosensor for the determination of cocaine using gold nanoparticles as the fluorescence quencher. By employing the progressive dilution (PD) strategy, simultaneous qualitative and quantitative analysis of cocaine in blood serum was achieved without pretreatment of the sample. The method described in this paper offers significant improvement in the detection accuracy and can be used to quantify cocaine levels in complex biological samples such as serum with a simple procedure.