Bio-inspired hierarchical particles for bioassays

Bioassay technology has been proved important in the field of environmental monitoring, disease diagnosis and clinical treatment. At present, diverse bioassay technologies have achieved reliability, rapid responsiveness, convenient operation, along with high sensitivity, and specificity. Among them, micro-nano structure particles-based bioassay will inevitably play an important role for future development. Especially, compared with typical solid, porous or hollow particles, hierarchical particles are featured with hierarchical configurations and considerable surface area, and thus have gained extensive research interest as ideal scaffolds for biological, medical and catalytic applications in biomedicine. In this review, we present the recent advances in bio-inspired hierarchical particles. After introducing a variety of hierarchical particles and their synthesis methods, we focus on their applications in multiple biological detections of different targets such as proteins, DNA, RNA, exosomes and cells. In addition, the highlighted applications of hierarchical particles in bioassays for clinical diagnosis are also summarized and prospected.