Programmable electrochemical biosensing platform based on catalytic hairpin assembly and entropy-driven catalytic cascade amplification circuit

Abstract

Herein, powerful DNA strand displacement reaction and sensitive electrochemical analysis method were ingeniously integrated to develop a programmable biosensing platform. Using DNA as the detection model, a cascade amplification system based on catalytic hairpin assembly and entropy-driven catalytic was constructed, and the reaction rate and signal amplification effect were significantly improved. The product of the cascade amplification circuit could undergo strand displacement reaction with the signal probe on the electrode surface to obtain sensitive electrochemical signal changes and realize highly sensitive detection of the target. In addition, without redesigning the DNA sequences in the cascade amplification circuit, the by-product strand typically wasted in traditional entropy-driven catalytic reactions can be fully utilized to construct a single-signal output biosensing system and even a dual-signal output ratiometric biosensing platform, improving the detection repeatability and reliability of the system, and expanding the application of DNA strand displacement reaction in electrochemical biosensing. Furthermore, benefiting from the design flexibility of the DNA molecules, the constructed biosensing platform realized the sensitive detection of aptamer substrate (kanamycin as an example) and certain metal ion (mercury as an example) by simply recoding the corresponding recognition sequence, demonstrating the good versatility of the biosensing platform.

Keywords: Cascade amplification; Catalytic hairpin assembly; Entropy-driven catalytic; Programmable biosensing; Ratiometric biosensor.