Gold nanoparticles and fluorescently-labelled DNA as a platform for biological sensing

Abstract

In the past decade gold nanoparticle-nucleic acid conjugates became progressively important for biomedical applications. Fluorophores attached to nucleic acid-gold nanoparticle conjugates have opened up a new era of biological sensing. The most promising advancement in this field was the invention of the so-called 'nano-flare' systems. These systems are capable of detecting specific endocellular targets such as mRNAs, microRNAs or small molecules in real time. In this minireview, we discuss the current progress in the field of DNA-nanoparticles as sensors, their properties, stability, cellular uptake and cytotoxicity.

Functionalized nanoparticles and applications

“…Gold nanoparticles coated with a shell of oligonucleotides (SNAs) have been successfully used for live cell mRNA detection coupled with targeted delivery of therapeutic agents, opening up new possibilities for the successful treatment of cancer. [11,12] Gold nanoparticles can also be successfully functionalized with peptides. It has been shown that peptide conjugation can result in highly active anti-angiogenic therapeutics.…”

Lable-free quadruple signal amplification strategy for sensitive electrochemical p53 gene biosensing

“…Furthermore, the integration of nanomaterials with functional DNA has provided new hybrid systems (Rosi and Mirkin, 2005). Among various nanomaterials, gold nanoparticles (AuNPs), with huge reactive surface area, unusual catalytic property and biocompatibility, were often used to prepare aptamer-conjugated AuNPs for detection of biomolecules Deng et al, 2013;Jungemann et al, 2013). And the formed DNA-AuNP conjugates have been utilized as amplifying labels for novel biosensing protocols owning to their unique physical and chemical features, such as multivalent binding capability, enhanced affinity, excellent catalytic properties for signal amplification (Qiu et al, 2013;Xu et al, 2013).…”

Investigating the stability of DNA-coated gold nanoparticles

“…[16][17][18] An important property of AuNP-DNA conjugates is their ability to bind complementary nucleic acids with a high affinity through Watson-Crick base pairing. 1,2 In recent years this property has led to the development of probes to visualise and detect -in the live cell, at real time-cell to cell variations in messenger RNA (mRNA) expressions. 1,[19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26] Research groups led by Mirkin and Alivisatos were the first to report that spherical AuNPs could be functionalised with oligonucleotide strands.…”

“…1,2 In recent years this property has led to the development of probes to visualise and detect -in the live cell, at real time-cell to cell variations in messenger RNA (mRNA) expressions. 1,[19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26] Research groups led by Mirkin and Alivisatos were the first to report that spherical AuNPs could be functionalised with oligonucleotide strands. 16,17 AuNPs functionalised with DNA have shown great promise as building blocks to form organized structures due to DNA's inherent specificity of molecular recognition.…”

“…[1][2][3][4] Compared with other nanoparticles, AuNPs have been extensively used due to the progress in chemical methods to control their morphology, which results in the tunability of their optical and thermal properties. [5][6][7][8][9] In particular, gold nanospheres (AuNSs) are broadly utilized in applications due to their fast and facile synthesis, low cytotoxicity and ease of bioconjugation.…”