The Recent Development of Hybridization Chain Reaction Strategies in Biosensors

Abstract

With the continuous development of biosensors, researchers have focused increasing attention on various signal amplification strategies to pursue superior performance for more applications. In comparison with other signal amplification strategies, hybridization chain reaction (HCR) as a powerful signal amplification technique shows its certain charm owing to nonenzymatic and isothermal features. Recently, on the basis of conventional HCR, this technique has been developed and improved rapidly, and a variety of HCR-based biosensors with excellent performance have been reported. Herein, we present a systematic and critical review on the research progress of HCR in biosensors in the last five years, including the newly developed HCR strategies such as multibranched HCR, migration HCR, localized HCR, in situ HCR, netlike HCR, and so on, as well as the combination strategies of HCR with isothermal signal amplification techniques, nanomaterials, and functional DNA molecules. By illustrating some representative works, we also summarize the advantage and challenge of HCR in biosensors, and offer a deep discussion of the latest progress and future development trends of HCR in biosensors.

Recent Progresses in Electrochemical DNA Biosensors for MicroRNA Detection

“…Hybridization chain reaction (HCR) has drawn attractive attention in fabricating electrochemical biosensors for miRNA detection since Dirks and Pierce (2004) proposed it in 2004. HCR is a kinetics-controlled reaction and can act as an amplification signal transducer without any external inputs to realize sensitive miRNAs detection (Zhang et al 2020;Zeng et al 2020). For a basic HCR amplification strategy, two stable species of DNA hairpins coexist in the solution until the introduction of initiator miRNA, which can open the first kind of DNA hairpins and expose a new single-stranded region to open the other species of hairpins (Dirks and Pierce 2004).…”

The TDs/aptamer cTnI biosensors based on HCR and Au/Ti3C2-MXene amplification for screening serious patient in COVID-19 pandemic

“… Li et al, 2018 ; Liu et al, 2019 ; Tan et al, 2021 ; Wang et al, 2019 ; Yang et al, 2019 ; Zhang et al, 2020 ; Zhang et al, 2020 ; Zhang et al, 2016 .…”

Rational engineering the DNA tetrahedrons of dual wavelength ratiometric electrochemiluminescence biosensor for high efficient detection of SARS-CoV-2 RdRp gene by using entropy-driven and bipedal DNA walker amplification strategy

“…In order to improve the sensitivity of ECL biosensors, various cyclic amplification strategies have been introduced, including hybridization chain reaction (HCR), rolling circle amplification (RCA), catalytic hairpin assembly (CHA), polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and so on [5] , [20] , [21] , [22] , [23] , [24] , [25] , [26] , [27] , [28] . These cyclic amplification strategies have complicated design processes and complicated secondary structures or require enzymes and variable temperature to participate in the reaction [29] , [30] .…”