With the advantages of mild reaction condition as well as high stereoselectivity and efficiency, chemoselective ligations including oxime chemistry, hydrazone chemistry, cycloaddition reaction, C-C multiple bond addition reaction, nucleophilic rings opening reaction, and alkynes-based reaction, have been applied in the field of biosensing. In this review, the roles of these chemoselective ligations for the construction of biosensors have been summarized. The ligations can serve for reactant preparation, interface modification, signal probe synthesis, molecular recognition, signal amplification, and output. Meanwhile, their recent applications for detection of various targets including small molecules, metal ions, protein, and nucleic acid so on, have been reviewed. Moreover, the development trend of these ligations in biosensing has also been prospected in this review.
Keywords: Biosensing; chemoselective ligation; detection.