Quantum dots-based “chemical tongue” for the discrimination of short-length Aβ peptides

A “chemical tongue” is proposed based on thiomalic acid-capped quantum dots (QDs) with signal enrichment provided by excitation-emission matrix (EEM) fluorescence spectroscopy for the determination of close structural analogs—short-length amyloid β (Aβ) peptides related to Alzheimer’s disease. Excellent discrimination is obtained by principal component analysis (PCA) for seven derivatives: Aβ 1-16 , Aβ 4-16 , Aβ 4-9 , Aβ 5-16 , Aβ 5-12 , Aβ 5-9 , Aβ 12-16 . Detection of Aβ 4-16 , Aβ 4-16 , and Aβ 5-9 in binary and ternary mixtures performed by QDs-based chemical tongue using partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) provided perfect 100% accuracy for the two studied peptides (Aβ 4-16 and Aβ 4-16 ), while for the third one (Aβ 5-9 ) it was slightly lower (97.9%). Successful detection of Aβ 4-16 at 1 pmol/mL (1.6 ng/mL) suggests that the detection limit of the proposed method for short-length Aβ peptides can span nanomolar concentrations. This result is highly promising for the development of simple and efficient methods for sequence recognition in short-length peptides and better understanding of mechanisms at the QD-analyte interface. Graphical Abstract