The helper oligonucleotides enable detection of folded single-stranded DNA by lateral flow immunoassay after HCR signal amplification.

A combination of Hybridization Chain Reaction (HCR) and Lateral Flow Immunoassay (LFIA) is an attractive strategy for a simple signal amplification DNA/RNA detection. The present study aimed to report a strategy used to solve a problem encountered when the target DNA contained folded secondary structure during HCR, enabling HCR hairpin probes to easily access the target site. The 24-nt conserved sequence within 3'-UTR, present only in dengue virus genome but not in other species, is an ideal target to use as a probe binding site for pan-dengue virus detection. Thus, the 105-nt target containing the 24-nt target sequence was chosen as a target with secondary structures. The 24-nucleotide (nt) synthetic target DNA successfully induced HCR reaction within 5 min at room temperature. However, the HCR detection of the 105-nt synthetic target DNA with secondary structures was problematic. The probe hybridization was prevented by the secondary structures of the target, resulting in a failure to generate HCR product. To solve this problem, two helper oligonucleotides (helper1 and helper2) were designed to linearize the folded structure of the 105-nt target through strand-displacement mechanism, allowing the HCR hairpin probes to easily access the target site. The HCR product with the labeled helper oligonucleotides and the labeled probes were successfully detected by LFIA. With this strategy, the combination of the helper-enhanced HCR and LFIA exhibited a limit of detection (LOD) in a nanomolar range of the 105-nt DENV synthetic target DNA. Our study demonstrated that signal amplification by the combination of HCR and LFIA could successfully detect the target DNA with secondary structure, but not target RNA with secondary structure. In summary, this work provided a proof of concept of two main issues including probe hybridization enhancement by helper oligonucleotide for the target with complicated secondary structure and the advantage of a combination of labeled helper and HCR probes design for LFIA to overcome the false positive result from HCR probe leakage. Our findings on the use of helper oligonucleotides may be beneficial for the development of other isothermal amplification, since the secondary structure of the target is one of the major obstacles among hybridization-based methods.

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