Chemiluminescence in Biomedicine

Abstract

Chemiluminescence, a luminescence phenomenon in which photons emission is obtained as a result of a chemical reaction, represents a versatile analytical tool, providing high sensitivity and specificity in a wide range of applications in biotechnology, pharmacology, molecular biology, biochemistry and environmental analysis. Owing to its peculiar characteristics, chemiluminescence ensures high detectability, due to the virtual total absence of the background signal, wide dynamic range, which allows analytes to be measured over a broad range of concentrations, and amenability to miniaturization, as no photoexcitation source and wavelength selection systems (e.g., filters) are required.

Chemiluminescence has important applications in analytical chemistry and biomedicine. Owing to its specificity and rapidity, chemiluminescence has been coupled with flow-injection analysis and post-column HPLC and capillary electrophoresis detection, with applications mostly in the pharmaceutical field, but also in food, environmental and biomedical analyses. Furthermore, several bioassays and biosensors based on chemiluminescence have been developed for quantitative and multiplex analysis of molecules (such as hormones, drugs, pollutants), proteins, and nucleic acids of biomedical interest. These methods, which take advantage of chemiluminescence high detectability and simple analytical format, often exploit a variety of miniaturized analytical formats, such as microfluidics, microarrays, lab-on-chip, and paper-based analytical devices.

After a brief introduction on the main chemiluminescence systems that find analytical applications and instrumentation for chemiluminescence detection, this chapter presents the main recent and up-to-date applications in the field and discusses the approaches, challenges, achievements, and open issues.