A Label-Free Fluorescent Sensor Based on the Formation of Poly(thymine)-Templated Copper Nanoparticles for the Sensitive and Selective Detection of MicroRNA from Cancer Cells

Abstract

In this work, a simple and label-free fluorescence “off” to “on” platform was designed for the sensitive and selective detection of microRNA (miRNA) in cancer cells. This method utilized a padlock DNA-based rolling circle amplification (P-RCA) to synthesize fluorescent poly(thymine) (PolyT) which acted as a template for the synthesis of copper nanoparticles (CuNPs) within 10 minutes under mild conditions. While the repeated PolyT sequence was used as the template for CuNP synthesis, other non-PolyT parts (single strand-DNAs without the capacity to act as the template for CuNP formation) served as “smart glues” or rigid linkers to build complex nanostructures. Under the excitation wavelength of 340 nm, the synthesized CuNPs emitted strong red fluorescence effectively at 620 nm. To demonstrate the use of this method as a universal biosensor platform, lethal-7a (let-7a) miRNA was chosen as the standard target. This sensor could achieve highly sensitive and selective detection of miRNA in the presence of other homologous analogues for the combination of P-RCA with the fluorescent copper nanoparticle. Overall, this novel label-free method holds great potential in the sensitive detection of miRNA with high specificity in real samples.