Abstract
It is well known that cancer incidence and death rates have been growing, but the development of cancer theranostics and therapeutics has been a challenging work. Recently, nucleic acid probe–based fluorescent sensing and imaging have achieved remarkable improvements in a variety of cancer management techniques, credited to their high sensitivity, good tolerance to interference, fast detection, and high versatility. Herein, nucleic acid probe–based fluorescent sensing and imaging are labeled with advanced fluorophores, which are essential for fast and sensitive detection of aberrant nucleic acids and other cancer-relevant molecules, consequently performing cancer early diagnosis and targeted treatment. In this review, we introduce the characteristics of nucleic acid probes, summarize the development of nucleic acid probe–based fluorescent sensing and imaging, and prominently elaborate their applications in cancer diagnosis and treatment. In discussion, some challenges and perspectives are elaborated in the field of nucleic acid probe–based fluorescent sensing and imaging.
Highlights
Nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) are one of the most essential components for organisms
Specific nucleic acid probes hold with a particular sequence, and they can recognize a broad range of targets, such as metal ions, small organic molecules, proteins, and even viruses or cells
There are some defects that need to be improved: i) The nucleic acid probes might lose the ability to hybridize with target strands when the target sequences form secondary structures such as hairpins or quadruplexes, subsequently disturbing the surrounding sequences (Ming et al, 2019)
Summary
Nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) are one of the most essential components for organisms. Nucleic acid mutations, such as DNA translocations (Javadekar and Raghavan, 2015), small insertions and deletions (indels), and single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) (Mohlendick et al, 2019), are frequent events during cancer progression. Since nucleic acid probe–based fluorescent sensing and imaging are attractive ways to identify the status of disease development, they have been widely investigated for usage in the early diagnosis and targeted treatment of various cancers by transforming biorecognition events into an amplified fluorescence signal (Mo et al, 2017; Lou et al, 2019; Li et al, 2021) Such tools allow for direct molecular recognition between nucleic acid probes and tested targets in living cells and tissues, which can quantitatively discriminate the amount and position of mutated DNA by producing an recordable and interpretable fluorescence signal (Hamd-Ghadareh et al, 2017). AgNCs, silver nanoclusters; AuNPs, gold nanoparticles; CDs, carbon dots; QDs, quantum dots; CCPs, cationic conjugated polymers
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