Selection and Biosensor Application of Aptamers for Small Molecules.

Franziska Pfeiffer,Günter Mayer

doi:10.3389/fchem.2016.00025

Abstract

Small molecules play a major role in the human body and as drugs, toxins, and chemicals. Tools to detect and quantify them are therefore in high demand. This review will give an overview about aptamers interacting with small molecules and their selection. We discuss the current state of the field, including advantages as well as problems associated with their use and possible solutions to tackle these. We then discuss different kinds of small molecule aptamer-based sensors described in literature and their applications, ranging from detecting drinking water contaminations to RNA imaging.

Highlights

State of the ArtIt has been 25 years since the invention of SELEX by Tuerk and Gold (1990) and Ellington and Szostak (1990), and likewise for the generation of ribozymes by Joyce (1989)
Explosives 2,4,6-Trinitrotoluene (TNT) is a commonly used explosive material whose detection is necessary for public safety as well as environmental and water decontamination. Different aptamers against it were selected with biosensing applications in mind: Ehrentreich-Förster et al were the only ones up to now to use their sensor for the detection of TNT in soil, solvent and water samples (Ehrentreich-Förster et al, 2008); others developed a sandwich assay (Ho et al, 2012), an electrochemical (Priyanka et al, 2014), and a Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET)based aptasensor, the latter of which combined the use of a TNTaptamer and an antibody (Sabherwal et al, 2014), but none was tested in real samples
Approaches where the aptamer is not used as regulator, but allosterically regulated by a different nucleic acid include an aptamer that only binds its target, ATP, in the presence of a specific messenger RNA (mRNA) (Cong and Nilsen-Hamilton, 2005) and complementary strands of different lengths that were used to fine-tune the affinity of a sensor based on the cocaine aptamer (Porchetta et al, 2012)

Summary

Introduction

State of the ArtIt has been 25 years since the invention of SELEX (systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment) by Tuerk and Gold (1990) and Ellington and Szostak (1990), and likewise for the generation of ribozymes by Joyce (1989). Apart from the importance of folding mentioned previously, many aptamers binding to small molecules possess affinities in the micrometer range (McKeague and Derosa, 2012), which means that sensors based on them might not reach the necessary sensitivity.

Results

Conclusion