Abstract
Monitoring telomerase activity with high sensitive and reliable is of great importance to cancer analysis. In this paper, we report a sensitive and facile method to detect telomerase activity using AIEgens modified probe (TPE-Py-DNA) as a fluorescence reporter and exonuclease III (Exo III) as a signal amplifier. With the aid of telomerase, repeat units (TTAGGG)n are extended from the end of template substrate oligonucleotides (TS primer) that form duplex DNAs with TPE-Py-DNA. Then, Exo III catalyzes the digestion of duplex DNAs, liberating elongation product and releasing hydrophobic TPE-Py. The released hydrophobic TPE-Py aggregate together and produce a telomerase-activity-related fluorescence signal. The liberated product hybridizes with another TPE-Py-DNA probe, starting the second cycle. Finally, we obtain the target-to-signal amplification ratio of 1:N2. This strategy exhibits good performance for detecting clinical urine samples (distinguishing 15 cancer patients’ samples from 8 healthy ones) and checking intracellular telomerase activity (differentiating cell lines including HeLa, MDA-MB-231, MCF-7, A375, HLF and MRC-5 from the cells pretreated with telomerase-related drug), which shows its potential in clinical diagnosis as well as therapeutic monitoring of cancer.
Published Version
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