Molecular architectures for electrocatalytic amplification of oligonucleotide hybridization

In this work, we describe a new platform suitable for electrocatalytic amplification of oligonucleotide hybridization based on the use of supramolecular bioconjugates incorporating ferrocene-labeled streptavidin. Our goals were aimed at designing a biosensing platform which could support highly reproducible and stable electrocatalytic amplification with maximum efficiency. The use of nonlabeled streptavidin as an underlying layer promotes a major improvement on the characteristics of the amplified electrochemical signal. In addition, the electrocatalytic current can be easily amplified by tuning the concentration of electron donor species in solution. Because of the fact that the redox labels are bioconjugated to the DNA strands, increasing the ionic strength does not lead to the loss of redox labels. More importantly, increasing the concentration of donors only involves the magnification of the signal without implying the permeation of donors (thus reducing the efficient electrocatalysis). This approach represents a major improvement on the use of electrocatalytically amplified DNA-sensing platforms, thus overcoming any possible limitation in connection with the reproducibility and reliability of this well-established method.