An electrochemical biosensor designed with entropy-driven autocatalytic DNA circuits for sensitive detection of ovarian cancer-derived exosomes

Abstract

Intelligent artificial DNA circuits have emerged as a promising approach for modulating signaling pathways and signal transduction through rational design, which may contribute to comprehensively realizing biomolecular sensing of organisms. In this work, we have fabricated an electrochemical biosensor for the sensitive and accurate detection of ovarian cancer-derived exosomes by constructing an entropy-driven autocatalytic DNA circuit (EADC). Specifically, the robust EADC is prepared by the self-assembly of well-designed DNA probes, and upon stimulation of the presence of ovarian cancer cells-derived exosomes, numerous inputs can be produced to feedback and accelerate the reaction. The catalytic abilities of the generated input sequences play a pivotal role in EADC and dramatically enhance the signal amplification capability. Through the combination of the autocatalytic circuit and circular cleavage reactions, significantly changed electrochemical signals can be recorded for sensitive analysis of the exosomes with a remarkably low detection limit of 30 particles/μL. Moreover, the proposed enzyme-free biosensor shows exceptional performance in distinguishing patient samples from healthy samples, which exhibits promising prospects for the clinical diagnosis of ovarian cancer.