Abstract
In the last fifteen years, the nucleic acid biosensors and delivery area has seen a breakthrough due to the interrelation between the recognition of nucleic acid’s high specificity, the great sensitivity of electrochemical and optical transduction and the unprecedented opportunities imparted by nanotechnology. Advances in this area have demonstrated that the assembly of nanoscaled materials allows the performance enhancement, particularly in terms of sensitivity and response time, of functional nucleic acids’ biosensing and delivery to a level suitable for the construction of point-of-care diagnostic tools. Consequently, this has propelled detection methods using nanomaterials to the vanguard of the biosensing and delivery research fields. This review overviews the striking advancement in functional nanomaterials’ assisted biosensing and delivery of nucleic acids. We highlight the advantages demonstrated by selected well-known and rising star functional nanomaterials (metallic, magnetic and Janus nanomaterials) focusing on the literature produced in the past five years.
Highlights
IntroductionThere is an increasing demand for the simple, sensitive, rapid and accurate determination of nucleic acids in fields such as clinical diagnostics, environmental monitoring and food quality control, as well as for the delivery of functional nucleic acids for therapeutic purposes
Today, there is an increasing demand for the simple, sensitive, rapid and accurate determination of nucleic acids in fields such as clinical diagnostics, environmental monitoring and food quality control, as well as for the delivery of functional nucleic acids for therapeutic purposes. some of the available conventional methodologies for the determination of nucleic acids provide high sensitivity and sampling frequency, they involve multistep, complex and time-demanding protocols
This review focuses on these nanomaterials due to the excellent capabilities that gold nanomaterials and Janus and/or magnetic type nanodevices exhibit to improve the efficiency and reduce the time of nucleic acid biosensing and delivery through pre-concentration, guided at will, self-propulsion, or cellular internalization, without compromising viability and single-cell resolution
Summary
There is an increasing demand for the simple, sensitive, rapid and accurate determination of nucleic acids in fields such as clinical diagnostics, environmental monitoring and food quality control, as well as for the delivery of functional nucleic acids for therapeutic purposes. The intracellular delivery of functional nucleic acids, such as RNA transfection agents, able to perform efficient therapeutic actions still needs to overcome important challenges, including the lack of targeting modalities, limited loading efficiency, internalization barriers, and biocompatibility issues [3,4]. In this context, the ultrasound-assisted efficient internalization and intracellular mobility demonstrated by cell viability compatible gold nanowires (AuNWs) proves to be very promising to address such challenges. The outstanding conductivity of AuNPs has been used in the development of biosensing methodologies in which the target binding is detected through AuNPs-mediated or inhibited electron transfer [17]
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