Dual-channel sensing strategy based on gold nanoparticles cooperating with carbon dots and hairpin structure for assaying RNA and DNA

Abstract

By employing the attractive performance of fluorescent carbon dots and the assistant of hairpin structure, an innovative dual-channel biosensor on the basis of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) for detecting multiple nucleotide sequences has been successfully proposed. In brief, the fluorescence of carbon dots (CDs) was quenched in the absence of the targets, and the hairpin structure was hybridized with the AuNPs-DNA and resulted in recovering the fluorescence. Instead, the presence of breast cancer (BRCA1) RNA/DNA could specifically bind with its contrary sequence to release the CDs from AuNPs, hence leading to the fluorescence recovery as a positive signal. Again, the hairpin structure can be released in the presence of thymidine kinase (TK1) RNA/DNA, thus induced a fluorescence quenching accordingly. Subsequently, the prepared sensing model was applied to detect BRCA1 RNA/DNA respectively accompanied with a linear range of 4–120nM as well as a detection limit of 1.5nM and 2.1nM, and 10–120nM as well as a detection limit of 3.6nM and 4.5nM for TK1 RNA/DNA respectively. More importantly, this sensing model could assay any possible gene sequence or aptamer-substrate complexes by appropriately programming.