Enzyme-free and ultrasensitive electrochemical detection of nucleic acids by target catalyzed hairpin assembly followed with hybridization chain reaction

Intelligent DNA machine for the ultrasensitive colorimetric detection of nucleic acids

“…Clinically, accurate analysis of nucleic acids, especially those associated with cancers, acts as an indispensable tool not only for early disease diagnosis and monitoring of treatment progress (Ji et al 2012;Li et al 2012;Liu et al 2013b) but also for the disease-marker discovery and their function studies (Mascini and Tombelli 2008;Tothill 2009). To date, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is frequently adopted for genetic amplification testing (Hindson et al 2011;Saunders et al 2013).…”

Highly sensitive DNA detection using cascade amplification strategy based on hybridization chain reaction and enzyme-induced metallization

“…Due to the low abundance of disease specific DNA and the complexity of the biological samples, highly sensitive and selective approaches for DNA detection are required in clinical applications. To meet this challenge, many methods have been well developed, for example, electrochemical sensing (Kong et al 2014; Liu et al 2013a), fluorescence (Hu et al 2013; Niu et al 2010) and chemiluminescence detection (Li and He 2009; Wang et al 2013c), and föster resonance energy resonance energy transfer (FRET) (Liu et al 2013b; Su et al 2014; Xing et al 2013). To further boost the performance, signal amplification strategies with various enzymes are usually adopted, such as exonuclease III-assisted amplification (Gao and Li 2013; Luo et al 2012), rolling circle amplification (Xu et al 2012), and strand displacement amplification (Wang et al 2011; Zhang et al 2013).…”

Cascaded strand displacement for non-enzymatic target recycling amplification and label-free electronic detection of microRNA from tumor cells

“…TSDR can take place without the involvement of any enzymes at room temperature, exhibits high sequence-dependence, and has been widely used in constructing different dynamic DNA devices, including DNA nanomachines [19], DNA circuits [20] and catalytic reaction networks [21]. The application of TSDR for electrochemical detection of inorganic ions [22], proteins [23], DNA and RNA [24,25] has also been reported in recent years. Herein, by using a junction probe, we report a non-enzyme, TSDR-mediated target recycling strategy for amplified and label-free electrochemical detection of miRNA-21 from human breast cancer cells.…”