Nanopore single molecule ATP detection based on the dual effects of specific capturing and signal amplification

Abstract

Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) plays a crucial role in energy metabolism. Some serious diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease are related to abnormal ATP concentrations. Fast, sensitive, and specific ATP detection is important and challenging in disease diagnosis and biomedical research. In present study, conical nanopore was designed and employed to detect ATP at single molecule level. For overcoming the inherent defects such as non-selectivity and low sensitivity of nanopore in sensing small target molecule, two collaborative improvements of specific identification and signal amplification were proposed. We first used split aptamer capture probes (H1 and S1) to anchor ATP molecule, and then used auxiliary probes (H2 and H3) to form a long-nicked duplex ATP-DNA concatemer by hybridization chain reaction (HCR). Referring ATP-DNA concatemer rather than native ATP to nanopore sensor, characteristic current signals with high signal-to-noise ratio were obtained. By such indirect way, specific and sensitive ATP detection was realized with a linear range from 20 pM to 5 nM and a detection limit of 3.9 pM (S/N = 3). Additionally, the sensor exhibited many merits such as simplify, anti-interference, and especially allowing ATP detection in real sample. So, we believe that the nanopore sensor has good application prospects in screening and management of ATP-related diseases.