Lateral-flow immunoassays (LFIs or LFIAs) are a widely used point-of-care technology. They are most familiar as home-pregnancy tests, but are also employed for testing for a wide variety of diseases, biomarkers, and even small molecules Visually-read, LFIAs typical use colloidal gold or colored latex as the reporter elements for the recognition binding event. While simple to perform and easy to read, the sensitivity of LFIAs is ultimately limited by the extinction coefficients of the reporter elements as enough material must be localized to be visually observed. We have substituted specially-prepared, colloidal palladium for the colorimetric labels and use the palladium nanoparticles as a chemical catalyst to produce an easily-observable, stable, blue dye that localizes at the capture line. We term our test system cLFIAT for catalytic LFIAs.
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