Nanoparticle-enabled rapid detection of microbial threats to Sanxingdui ancient ivories

The water-filled ancient ivory relics unearthed at the Sanxingdui site face a terrible risk of disappearing due to microbial degradation, which affects the structural integrity of the relics. In response to this pressing conservation crisis, a nanotechnology-based Visual Microbiome detection (VMD-Nano) has been developed using the properties of gold nanorods (AuNRs) and magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) to quickly and accurately identify harmful microorganisms on artifacts. VMD-Nano system adopts visual colorimetric detection method and recombinant enzyme polymerase amplification (RPA) technology to rapidly detect the genome of the target microorganism, and adjusts the etching degree of AuNRs by using the shielding effect of nucleic acid molecules on the peroxidase-like activity of MNPs, thus showing obvious colorimetric changes. As a proof of concept, our proposed method successfully visualized the detection of 6 typical microorganisms within 30 min, and verified the stability of the method in 50 groups of actual samples. The feasibility of the method is verified by the actual ancient ivory samples. This rapid visual detection method provides a promising detection method for on-site monitoring of microbial degradation of cultural relics.