Carbon Nanotubes/Gold Nanoclusters Based “Turn on” FRET Fluorescent Assay for miRNA Detection

Abstract

This paper presents a “turn on” fluorescent assay with high sensitivity and rapidity for testing miRNA-195 on the basis of a novel FRET pair consisting of Lys-Au NCs (which have been successfully obtained through less than 2.5 min of synthesis via microwave (MW)-assisted technology) and carbon nanotubes (CNTs). Based on this FRET pair, given a detection limit set at 0.36 nM, miRNA-195 can be quantified in the range of 1–10000 nM. Moreover, the level of miRNA-195 in human serum was measured by virtue of this method, and a recovery of 98.6%–102.4% was achieved, demonstrating that the method put forward in this paper was applicable to actual samples for quantitatively examining miRNA-195.