Recent progress in the development of DNA-based biosensors integrated with hybridization chain reaction or catalytic hairpin assembly

Liuting Mo; Wanqi He; Ziyi Li; Danlian Liang; Runhong Qin; Mingxiu Mo; Chan Yang; Weiying Lin

doi:10.3389/fchem.2023.1134863

Recent progress in the development of DNA-based biosensors integrated with hybridization chain reaction or catalytic hairpin assembly

Front Chem. 2023 Feb 16:11:1134863. doi: 10.3389/fchem.2023.1134863. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Liuting Mo¹, Wanqi He¹, Ziyi Li¹, Danlian Liang¹, Runhong Qin¹, Mingxiu Mo¹, Chan Yang¹, Weiying Lin¹

Affiliation

¹ Guangxi Key Laboratory of Guangxi Key Laboratory of Electrochemical Energy Materials, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Institute of Optical Materials and Chemical Biology, Guangxi University, Nanning, China.

Abstract

As isothermal, enzyme-free signal amplification strategies, hybridization chain reaction (HCR) and catalytic hairpin assembly (CHA) possess the advantages such as high amplification efficiency, excellent biocompatibility, mild reactions, and easy operation. Therefore, they have been widely applied in DNA-based biosensors for detecting small molecules, nucleic acids, and proteins. In this review, we summarize the recent progress of DNA-based sensors employing typical and advanced HCR and CHA strategies, including branched HCR or CHA, localized HCR or CHA, and cascaded reactions. In addition, the bottlenecks of implementing HCR and CHA in biosensing applications are discussed, such as high background signals, lower amplification efficiency than enzyme-assisted techniques, slow kinetics, poor stability, and internalization of DNA probes in cellular applications.

Keywords: biosensor; catalytic hairpin assembly; cell imaging; disease diagnosis; hybridization chain reaction.

Publication types

Review

Grants and funding

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 21877048, 22077048, and 22277014), Guangxi Natural Science Foundation (Nos. 2022GXNSFBA035533, AD21220061, 2021GXNSFDA075003, 2022GXNSFBA035482), the startup fund of Guangxi University (A3040051003, A3040051011).