A "signal-on" electrochemical biosensor based on DNAzyme-driven bipedal DNA walkers and TdT-mediated cascade signal amplification strategy.

In this work, a dual amplified signal enhancement approach based on coupling deoxyribozyme (DNAzyme)-driven bipedal DNA walkers (BDW) and terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase (TdT)-mediated DNA elongation signal amplifications has been developed for highly sensitive and label-free electrochemical detection of thrombin in human serums. In presence of thrombin, the BDW complex, which is comprised from the target thrombin and two DNAzyme-containing probes, can exhibit autonomous cleavage behavior on the surface of the substrate DNA (SD) modified electrode, and remove the cleaved DNA fragment from the electrode surface. Subsequently, the TdT can catalyze the elongation of the SD with free 3'-OH termini and formation of many G-quadruplex sequence replicates with the presence of 2'-deoxyaguanosine-5'-triphosphate (dGTP) and adenosine 5'-triphosphate (dATP) at a molar ratio of 6:4. These G-quadruplex sequences bind hemin and generate drastically amplified current response for sensitive detection of thrombin in a "signal-on" and completely label-free fashion. Under optimized conditions, the response peak current was linear with the concentration of thrombin in the range from 0.5 pM to 100000 pM with detection limit of 0.31 pM. This research provides us a sustainable idea for the hyphenated multiple amplification strategies and a stable and effective method for the detection of protein biomarkers.

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Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.